Beyond Incivility: Understanding Patterns of Uncivil and Intolerant Discourse in Online Political Talk

This article takes up the popular argument that much online discussion is toxic and hence harmful to democracy, and argues that the pervasiveness of incivility is not incompatible with democratically relevant political talk. Instead of focusing on the tone of political talk, scholars interested in understanding the extent to which digital platforms threaten democratic values should focus on expressions of intolerance. I demonstrate the validity of this conceptual model by investigating the discursive and contextual features associated with incivility and intolerance online in the context of public comments in two different platforms—news websites and Facebook. Results show that incivility and intolerance occur in meaningfully different discussion settings. Whereas incivility is associated with features that reveal meaningful discursive engagement, such as justified opinion expression and engagement with disagreement, intolerance is likely to occur in homogeneous discussions about minorities and civil society—exactly when it can hurt democracy the most

Characterizing Disagreement in Online Political Talk: Examining Incivility and Opinion Expression on News Websites and Facebook in Brazil

This paper examines the ways people engage in political conversation triggered by exposure to political news in two different informal platforms in Brazil: Facebook and news websites. We analyze the extent to which disagreement is associated to discursive traits that are commonly associated with deliberative behavior, such as directly engaging with others, and trying to justify one’s views, and negative traits, such as incivility. The contributions of this paper can be summarized as follows. First, this paper emphasizes the importance of looking beyond a single platform and a single topic to understand political discussion online. Second, we demonstrate that online disagreement is positively associated with both deliberative traits, such as justified opinion expression, and non-deliberative traits, such as incivility, and argue that the latter is not enough to dismiss the value of political talk. We also demonstrate that the topic of a news story is relevant both to drive political conversation and to spark political disagreement: controversies involving celebrities and stories covering international affairs are more likely to drive heterogeneous conversations than more conventional political topics (e.g. government, policy), even though these are the topics that tend to attract more political talk. Finally, this study contributes to fill an important gap in the literature, looking beyond the US and Western European contexts by examining political talk in Brazil, the fourth largest digital market in the world

Das Redes para as Ruas: Mídias Sociais como novas “armas” na luta por reconhecimento?

A apropriação cotidiana de sites de redes e mídias sociais, entre outras plataformas de conteúdo colaborativo e páginas da internet para fins de participação política, mobilização social e variadas formas de ativismo, é um fenômeno contemporâneo que carece de análise e compreensão. A grande repercussão de movimentos que começaram, cresceram ou simplesmente repercutiram em mídias sociais diversas contribui para inserir estes eventos na agenda dos media, dando visibilidade, voz e vez para reivindicações e lutas por reconhecimento que, em outros tempos, teriam dificuldade em atingir a esfera pública. A proposta deste artigo é refletir acerca das possibilidades democráticas da apropriação de ferramentas digitais para mobilização política e social à luz da teoria do reconhecimento de Axel Honneth  (2003). O argumento central aqui desenvolvido postula que as ferramentas sociais da internet proveem seus usuários de novas capacidades de articulação, mobilização e comunicação, e podem exercer diferentes papéis em movimentos sociais que podem ser descritos como lutas por reconhecimento.

“It's Not Just Hate”:A Multi-Dimensional Perspective on Detecting Harmful Speech Online

Well-annotated data is a prerequisite for good Natural Language Processing models. Too often, though, annotation decisions are governed by optimizing time or annotator agreement. We make a case for nuanced efforts in an interdisciplinary setting for annotating offensive online speech. Detecting offensive content is rapidly becoming one of the most important real-world NLP tasks. However, most datasets use a single binary label, e.g., for hate or incivility, even though each concept is multi-faceted. This modeling choice severely limits nuanced insights, but also performance. We show that a more fine-grained multi-label approach to predicting incivility and hateful or intolerant content addresses both conceptual and performance issues. We release a novel dataset of over 40, 000 tweets about immigration from the US and UK, annotated with six labels for different aspects of incivility and intolerance. Our dataset not only allows for a more nuanced understanding of harmful speech online, models trained on it also outperform or match performance on benchmark datasets. Warning: This paper contains examples of hateful language some readers might find offensive

Atrás e além das câmeras: proposições iniciais para o campo do making-of

This article discusses transformations in the cinematographic experience through a specific movie extra material, the making of, in its two main formats: documentaries (Mdoc) and featurettes. The mechanisms that allow delineating the field of the making of within the North American cinematographic industry are shown, where agents and institutions demonstrate concern with the practices and rules of a structure whose specificity is not only identifiable but also legitimate. We analyze the context of profusion and formats, filmmakers and production patterns, and the various aesthetic-narrative arrangements.O artigo discute as transformações na experiência cinematográfica por meio de um material extrafílmico específico, o making of, em seus dois formatos principais: documentaries (MDoc) e featurettes. Explicitam-se os mecanismos que permitem delinear o campo do making of no interior da indústria cinematográfica norte-americana, conforme conceitos de Bourdieu, em que agentes e instituições demonstram preocupação com práticas e regras de uma estrutura cuja especificidade é identificável e legítima. Empreendem-se análises do contexto de profusão e formatos, de realizadores e modelos produtivos e dos diferentes arranjos estético-narrativos

E-Democracy and Collaborative Lawmaking: The Discussion of the Political Reform in Brazil

Democratic governments are increasingly adopting the Internet to foster political participation. With a varied array of e-consultation, e-deliberation, and e-participation initiatives, the Internet provides opportunities for citizens to engage with political institutions in several ways. This article contributes to this literature by analyzing a Brazilian case, the House of Representatives’ Portal E-Democracia—an initiative that promotes citizen participation in lawmaking issues. We analyze how citizens engaged in the discussions around the political reform agenda, an important issue and a response to social movements and protests in June 2013. We specifically look into the dynamics of interaction and the heterogeneity and civility of these discussions. We also investigate whether participants were interested in providing solutions to the issues at stake

Introducing CAD: the Contextual Abuse Dataset

Online abuse can inflict harm on users and communities, making online spaces unsafe and toxic. Progress in automatically detecting and classifying abusive content is often held back by the lack of high quality and detailed datasets.We introduce a new dataset of primarily English Reddit entries which addresses several limitations of prior work. It (1) contains six conceptually distinct primary categories as well as secondary categories, (2) has labels annotated in the context of the conversation thread, (3) contains rationales and (4) uses an expert-driven group-adjudication process for high quality annotations. We report several baseline models to benchmark the work of future researchers. The annotated dataset, annotation guidelines, models and code are freely available