Incivility in online news and Twitter: effects on attitudes toward scientific topics when reading in a second language

Due to the participatory nature of Web 2.0, polite communication on social media and news sites can stand side by side with uncivil comments. Research on online incivility has been conducted with users reading in their mother tongues (L1), while the potential effects of incivility in a second language (L2) have been largely under- explored. This paper analyzes the effects of uncivil comments written in an L2 on attitudes around emerging technologies. Accordingly, study 1 replicates and extends a previous experiment on the effects of incivility to online news on risk perceptions of nanotechnology (Anderson et al., 2014), by adding an ‘L2 condition’ (uncivil comments written in an L2). Then, study 2 analyzes the effect of incivility on four fictitious Twitter debates around different scientific issues, varying language (L1 or L2), and civility. Results from both studies show that participants are more likely to endorse claims written in a civil rather than uncivil manner, but only in the L1. The results contribute to understanding how online communication is affected by reading in an L2

Incivility and Public Participation

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Gibt es den "Nasty Effect"? Replikation und Erweiterung der Modellstudie zur Wirkung von Inzivilität im Diskurs zu Schlüsseltechnologien

Der Nutzen und das Risiko aufkommender Technologien werden vermehrt im Web 2.0 diskutiert. Gegensätzliche Meinungen in einem inzivilen Kommunikationsstil sind in den Kommentarspalten ubiquitär. Das macht es für die Wissenschaft zu einer zentralen und dringlichen Aufgabe, die online wirkenden Mechanismen der Inzivilität zu identifizieren, zu verstehen und zu erklären. Anderson et al. (2014) haben in ihrer renommierten Studie "'The Nasty Effect': Online Incivility and Risk Perceptions of Emerging Technologies" die polarisierende Wirkung von inzivilen Kommentaren auf die Risikowahrnehmung einer Schlüsseltechnologie aufgezeigt. Die vorliegende Forschungsarbeit repliziert die Studie von Anderson et al. (2014) und erweitert das bestehende Modell auf zwei Ebenen. Die erste Erweiterung zeichnet sich dadurch aus, dass nebst der Nanotechnologie eine zweite Schlüsseltechnologie, die Atomkraft, als Untersuchungsgegenstand herangezogen wird. Den zweiten Zusatz bildet die Stärke der Voreinstellungen, welche als Moderator ins Modell aufgenommen wird. Die Probanden werden zufällig einer der beiden Schlüsseltechnologien zugeteilt, die Voreinstellungen der beiden Gruppen verglichen und mögliche signifikante Unterschiede in der Risikowahrnehmung untersucht. Dabei konnte der "Nasty Effect" lediglich bei der Schlüsseltechnologie Atomkraft in Wechselwirkung mit der Voreinstellung nachgewiesen werden. Die vorliegende Forschungsarbeit diskutiert aufgrund dieser entgegengesetzten Ergebnisse zur Ursprungsstudie Erklärungsgründe sowie Empfehlungen für zukünftige Forschungen in Bezug auf Online-Inzivilität. Anhand einer Online-Umfrage wurden 162 Personen am Institut für Kommunikations- und Medienwissenschaften an der Universität Zürich befragt. Die erhobenen Daten wurden in einem Ordinary Least Squares Modell mittels hierarchischer Regression analysiert

We Should Not Get Rid of Incivility Online

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.Incivility and toxicity have become concepts du jour in research about social media. The clear normative implication in much of this research is that incivility is bad and should be eliminated. Extensive research—including some that we’ve authored—has been dedicated to finding ways to reduce or eliminate incivility from online discussion spaces. In our work as part of the Civic Signals Initiative, we’ve been thinking carefully about what metrics should be adopted by social media platforms eager to create better spaces for their users. When we tell people about this project, removing incivility from the platforms frequently comes up as a suggested metric. In thinking about incivility, however, we’ve become less convinced that it is desirable, or even possible, for social media platforms to remove all uncivil content. In this short essay, we discuss research on incivility, our rationale for a more complicated normative stance regarding incivility, and what other orientations may be more useful. We conclude with a post mortem arguing that we should not abandon research on incivility altogether, but we should recognize the limitations of a concept that is difficult to universalize

The Political Uses and Abuses of Civility and Incivility

After exploring the challenges involved in defining incivility, this chapter addresses the evolution of the concept, notes the dispute over trend lines, and précises work on its psychological effects. It then outlines some functions that civility and incivility serve, such as the functions of differentiating and mobilizing, marginalizing the powerless, expressing, and deliberating. The use of calls for civility as a means of social control is discussed, and then the chapter flags questions worthy of additional attention

Incivility

Incivility is considered a significant challenge for democratic discourse and has been the subject of many studies in a variety of contexts. Although political incivility has a long research tradition, and scholarly attention toward the phenomenon has increased with the advance of social media, there is academic controversy regarding the concept and normative implications of incivility in political contexts. This chapter provides an overview of different incivility approaches in the extant literature, discusses key challenges in incivility research, and outlines normative implications. Further, we suggest future directions for incivility research and argue why an integrative, multidimensional concept of incivility offers great potential for incivility research in the field of political (online) communication

Does Sleep Deprivation Cause Online Incivility? Evidence from a Natural Experiment

Incivility between members is a major concern for many online communities. This paper provides empirical evidence that sleep deprivation is an important cause of incivility in online communities. Identification comes from the shift to Daylight Saving Time (DST) which leads to individuals experiencing reduced sleep time. Using an archival dataset from English Wikipedia and an annotated corpus, we train machine learning algorithms to automatically identify personal attack, aggressive, and toxic comments. We show that compared to other days, about 22% more uncivil messages originate from the impacted regions on the Mondays following the switch to DST. We also find that the effect is stronger for incivility on article talk pages compared with incivility on user talk pages. We discuss the strategies that can mitigate the harms to online communities due to sleep deprivation

Science blogs and online trolling: Do below-the-line comment spaces help or hurt science communication?

Questions have been raised over whether allowing comments on blogs and other sites is conducive to wider understanding of science. Jonathan Mendel and Hauke Riesch present a look at how online comments, even uncivil ones, can positively benefit community cohesion and inclusive engagement. But efforts must be taken to challenge destructive behaviour like trolling and to support those targeted with abuse