Comment sections and their role in a democratic society

Kommentarfelt lar lesere uttrykke seg offentlig innen en rekke temaer, gjør det mulig med direkte tilbakemelding til journalister og redaktører, og de kan potensielt legge til rette for en demokratisk verdifull offentlig debatt. Til tross for dette er kommentarfelt blitt kritisert på grunn av uhemmet atferd, usiviliserte og uhøflige kommentarer, samt politisk polariserende innhold. I den offentlige debatten blir kommentarfelt ofte beskrevet som problematiske, og det meste av forskning relatert til kommentarfelt setter søkelys på slik uhemmet atferd. Denne avhandlingen utforsker rollen kommentarfelt har i et demokratisk samfunn. Når man ser på kommentarfelt gjennom rammeverk basert på demokratiske teorier kan det virke som at kommentarfelt ikke lever opp til demokratiske standarder. Kommentarfelt har en tendens til å bli dømt basert på standardene til deliberative demokratiske teorier. Slike teorier legger vekt på åpen deltakelse og verdsetter beslutningstaking basert på rimelig argumentasjon. Å benytte slike teorier kan derimot være problematisk. Det vanskelig å bruke deliberative teorier som et rammeverk fordi kommentarfelt ikke har et spesifikt punkt der en beslutning blir tatt på bakgrunn av den foregående diskusjonen. En diskusjon i et kommentarfelt tar slutt når alle deltakere har sagt det de skulle si, slik at debatten dør på egen hånd uten at noen beslutninger har blitt tatt. Et annet sett med demokratiske teorier som kanskje passer kommentarfelt bedre, som for eksempel participatory liberal theory og agonistic democracy, fokuserer mer på deltakelse som viktig for demokratier. Kommentarfelt gjør i første øyekast deltakelse i offentlige debatter enklere. Men slike teorier fokuserer også på gjensidig respekt som et grunnlag for offentlig debatt, noe kommentarfelt er kritisert for å mangle. Det kan være at den beste teorien for å forstå kommentarfelts rolle i et demokratisk samfunn er ideen om post-demokrati, der kommentarfelt kan ha en rolle som et anti-establishment, ikke-profesjonelt forum på profesjonelle nyhetsnettsteder. I denne avhandlingen er tre interessefelt blitt forsket på gjennom tre artikler: effekten av anonymitet på antisosial atferd, anklagelser av trolling, og mediekritikk i kommentarfelt. Avhandlingen presenterer disse forskningsprosjektene og diskuterer kommentarfelts rolle I et demokratisk samfunn, samt de metodologiske utfordringene som følger med når man forsker på kommentarfelt. Siden antisosial atferd blir diskutert mye og anonymitet ofte blir brukt for å forklare slik atferd, ble en studie gjennomført der anonyme og ikke-anonyme kommentarer fra samme plattformer ble analysert. Anonymitet hadde en liten, men statistisk signifikant effekt på antisosial atferd. Avhandlingen har også funnet at anklagelser av trolling ofte var politisk motivert og brukt for å se bort fra andres argumenter man ikke var enige i, og at disse anklagelsene stort sett ble ignorert av andre deltakere og de som ble anklaget. Til slutt utforsker og kategoriserer avhandlingen kritikk av media i kommentarfelt. Tre typer kritikker blitt identifisert: kritikk av fokus, kvalitet og integritet. En andre dimensjon, målet for kritikk, ble også identifisert: journalister, nyhetsorganisasjoner, og media. Denne avhandlingen konkluderer med at kommentarfelts rolle i et demokratisk samfunn er utfordrende, og at det største hinderet for at kommentarfelt skal spille ne viktig positiv rolle er antisosial atferd. Men kommentarfelt har stort potensial til å kunne bli en demokratisk verdifull form for offentlige ytringer som får folk til å besøke nyhetsnettsteder, det er en plattform der folks meninger blir utfordret, og en plattform for konstruktiv kritikk av media.Newspaper comment sections provide readers with a public platform to voice their opinion on a wide range of topics, provide a direct line of feedback for journalists and editors, and have the potential of facilitating a democratically valuable public debate. However, comment sections have come under scrutiny for the prevalence of disinhibited behavior, uncivil and impolite comments, as well as politically polarizing content. In the public debate, comment sections are often described as problematic, and most research that relates to comment sections, tend to focus on incivility and impoliteness. This thesis explores the role of comment sections in a democratic society. When considering comment sections through frameworks based on democratic theories, comment sections appear to fail to live up to democratically valuable standards. Comment sections tend to be judged by the standards of theories such as deliberative democracy and discursive, which emphasize open participation and places high value on making decisions based on reasonable argumentation. Using these theories, however, might be problematic. It is difficult to use these theories as a framework for discussing comment sections, because comment sections do not have a set point when a decision is made based on a preceding discussion. A discussion in a comment section only ends when all commenters have said what they wanted to say, at which point the debate dies down on its own without any decision having been made. Comment sections might be more suited within democratic frameworks that focus more on participation, such as participatory liberal theory and agonistic democracy. Participatory theories focus more on the participation aspect of democracy, and comment sections do, at least on first glance, make participation in the public debate easier. However, these theories also emphasize mutual respect as a basis for public discussion, something that comment sections are criticized for lacking. In the end, it might be that the best theory to understand the role of comment sections in a democratic society is the idea of the post-democracy, in which comment sections may serve a role as an anti-establishment, non-professional forum on professional, establishment news sites. For this thesis, three topics of interest have been investigated in three papers: the effect of anonymity on toxicity, accusations of trolling, and media criticism in comment sections. This thesis presents these research projects and discusses the role of comment sections in a democratic society, as well as the methodological challenges when researching comment sections. As toxicity is a much-debated topic, and anonymity is often used to explain such behavior, a study was devised where anonymous and non-anonymous comments from the same platform were analyzed, showing that anonymity has a small, but statistically significant effect on toxicity. This thesis also found that accusations of trolling are often politically motivated and used to dismiss opposing arguments and that these accusations were mostly ignored by other debaters and the accused. Finally, this thesis explores and categorizes criticism of the media found in comment sections. Three kinds of media criticism were identified: criticism of focus, quality and of integrity. A second dimension, target of criticism, was also identified: journalists, news organizations, and the media. The thesis concludes that the role of comment sections in a democratic society is challenging and that the greatest obstacle for comment sections playing an important, positive role is the prevalence of toxic disinhibition. There is, however, great potential for comment sections being a democratically valuable forum for public expression that incentivizes people to engage with the news media, where people have their opinions challenged and a platform for constructive criticism of the media.Doktorgradsavhandlin

Presidential Exit

The biggest problem that we\u27re facing right now has to do with George Bush trying to bring more and more power into the executive branch and not go through Congress at all, and that\u27s what I intend to reverse when I\u27m president of the United States of America. Why is @BarackObama constantly issuing executive orders that are major power grabs of authority? President Trump signed the 30th executive order of his presidency on Friday, capping off a whirlwind period that produced more orders in his first 100 days than for any president since Harry Truman. The rash of executive orders underlines Trump\u27s focus on reversing as much of the Obama administration\u27s policy agenda as he can

Review of “Jurisdictional” Issues Under the Bumpers Amendment

The proposed Bumpers Amendment to the Administrative Procedure Act would encourage courts to be less deferential than they have previously been toward federal agencies\u27 views on issues of law. With regard to jurisdictional questions, the amendment would go further: it would invite courts not only to assert their independence, but also to disfavor agencies\u27 positions. Professor Levin regards this special rule of construction for jurisdictional questions as an attempt to achieve deregulation through judicial review. He criticizes this strategy as poorly conceived and calls attention to several weaknesses in the draftsmanship of the jurisdiction provision

How should peer-review panels behave?

Many governments wish to assess the quality of their universities. A prominent example is the UK’s new Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014. In the REF, peer-review panels will be provided with information on publications and citations. This paper suggests a way in which panels could choose the weights to attach to these two indicators. The analysis draws in an intuitive way on the concept of Bayesian updating (where citations gradually reveal information about the initially imperfectly-observed importance of the research). Our study should not be interpreted as the argument that only mechanistic measures ought to be used in a REF

National Institute of Mental Health Roundtable Discussion: Promissory Notes and Prevailing Norms in Social and Behavioral Sciences Research

Most workshops convened by the National Institute's of Health are devoted to the puzzle-solving activities of normal science, where the puzzles themselves and the strategies available for solving them are determined largely in advance by the shared paradigmatic assumptions, frameworks, and priorities of the scientific community's research paradigm. They are designed to facilitate what Thomas Kuhn referred to as elucidating topological detail within a map whose main outlines are available in advance. And apparently for good reason. Historical studies by Kuhn and others reveal that science moves fastest and penetrates most deeply when its practitioners work within well-defined and deeply ingrained traditions and employ the concepts, theories, methods, and tools of a shared paradigm. No paradigm is perfect and none is capable of identifying, let alone solving, all of the problems relevant to a given domain of inquiry. Thus, the essential day-to-day business of normal science is not to question the limits or adequacy of a given paradigm, but rather to exploit the presumed virtues for which it was adopted. As Kuhn cautioned in his discussion of paradigms, re-tooling, in science as in manufacture, as an extravagance to be reserved for the occasion that demands it. Well, as the marketing people say --- this is not your father's Oldsmobile. We are breaking with tradition today by stepping outside the map to initiate and pursue a long-overdue dialogue about paradigm reform and scientific retooling. Our warrant for prosecuting this agenda is a Kuhnian occasion that demands it--- is a protracted paradigm crisis, the neglect of which has hurt us terribly and the resolution of which will determine the viability and fate of the social and behavioral sciences in the 21st century. Since the details of the crisis are well know within and outside our ranks, a brief sketch of its main outlines will suffice as a framework for our dialogue today. They include, (a) widespread dissatisfaction with the meager theoretical progress and practical yield of more than a century of social and behavioral sciences research in many substantive domains, (b) long-neglected yet widely recognized deficiencies in the epistemological assumptions, discovery practices and justification standards of the dominant paradigm on which the social and behavioral sciences have relied --- and rely--- to conceptualize, interpret, and guide their empirical research, (c) a broadly based consensus among leading scholars and scientists about the need for fundamental paradigm reforms, and (d) institutional incentive structures that not only encourage and reinforce the status quo but discourage constructive reform efforts. Our objective for the next eight hours is to formulate strategies and recommendations for leveraging the resources and influence of the National Institute of Mental Health to foster a climate of constructive reforms where they are needed by freeing investigators in from the oppressive constraints of existing paradigms and facilitating, encouraging, and funding their retooling their effort

Emancipation from Affluenza: Leading Social Change in the Classroom

The purpose of this quasi-experimental study was to determine if one\u27s level of affluenza could be reduced through education and awareness. In particular, this study measured whether or not exposure to the benefits of community involvement, and the harm of overconsumption could alter the intentions that college students have regarding their behavior, as it pertains to materialism, consumption, and civic responsibility. The data were collected from college students in the form of pre-tests and post-tests utilizing an affluenza scale created for this research. Over the course of a semester, information and activities that elucidated the benefits of community involvement and the harm of overconsumption were integrated into the course curriculum. The post-test served to measure whether or not the curricular intervention altered attitudes and intentions regarding affluenza. Analysis data revealed that while individual statistical tests were not significant, some overall trends were evident, suggesting that the treatment may have influenced students to move further away from the ideals and attitudes associated with affluenza. Moreover, the affluenza scale was validated and refined. The results of this study have curricular applications for faculty and administrators at colleges and universities interested in implementing and carrying out a similar intervention, or implementing a program that focuses on reducing affluenza. Likewise, the findings offer sociological and social implications for faculty, activists, and community organizers interested in reducing consumption, wastefulness, materialistic attitudes, and those interested in encouraging civic responsibility, by offering additional insight into the issue of affluenza as well as means to begin to address it. Additionally, the Mattison Affluenza Scale itself can be utilized as a diagnostic tool, for instance as part of a needs assessment to determine where more programmatic attention or changes are needed. The electronic version of this Dissertation is at OhioLink ETD Center, www.ohiolink.edu/et

Speech as Conduct: Generally Applicable Laws, Illegal Courses of Conduct, “Situation-Altering Utterances,” and the Uncharted Zones

In many recent free speech controversies -- over crime-facilitating speech, hostile environment harassment, child custody decisions, doctors’ recommending medical marijuana to their patients, pro-jury-nullification advocacy, and more -- defenders of the speech restriction have argued that the speech isn’t really speech, but is instead tantamount to conduct. Sometimes people argue that there’s no First Amendment problem when speech is restricted under a generally applicable law that covers both speech and conduct. Sometimes they argue that speech may be punished if it’s “an integral part of conduct in violation of a valid criminal statute.” Sometimes they argue that the speech should be treated as conduct because it constitutes a “speech act” or a “situation-altering utterance.” This article critiques such “speech as conduct” arguments. The arguments, I contend, are fundamentally misguided (at least when the restriction applies to the speech because of the communicative impact of the speech), would often justify too much speech restriction, and tend to lead courts and commentators to focus on the wrong First Amendment questions

Trying Cases in the Media: A Comparative Overview

The essay deals with the problem of media impact on ongoing trials. In particular, it proposes a taxonomy of three comparative models of governance (traditional common law approach; US approach; Continental European approach) and makes a case for the recognition of presumption of innocence as a fundamental rigth vis-à-vis the court of public opinion

The reform of october 1979: how it happened and why

This study offers a historical review of the monetary policy reform of October 6, 1979, and discusses the influences behind it and its significance. We lay out the record from the start of 1979 through the spring of 1980, relying almost exclusively upon contemporaneous sources, including the recently released transcripts of Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meetings during 1979. We then present and discuss in detail the reasons for the FOMC's adoption of the reform and the communications challenge presented to the Committee during this period. Further, we examine whether the essential characteristics of the reform were consistent with monetarism, new, neo, or old-fashioned Keynesianism, nominal income targeting, and inflation targeting. The record suggests that the reform was adopted when the FOMC became convinced that its earlier gradualist strategy using finely tuned interest rate moves had proved inadequate for fighting inflation and reversing inflation expectations. The new plan had to break dramatically with established practice, allow for the possibility of substantial increases in short-term interest rates, yet be politically acceptable, and convince financial markets participants that it would be effective. The new operating procedures were also adopted for the pragmatic reason that they would likely succeed. JEL Klassifikation: E52, E58, E61, E65