Is Constructive Engagement Online a Lost Cause? Toxic Outrage in Online User Comments Across Democratic Political Systems and Discussion Arenas
| Autor: | Julia Jakob, Timo Dobbrick, Rainer Freudenthaler, Patrik Haffner, Hartmut Wessler |
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| Rok vydání: | 2022 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Communication Research. :009365022110627 |
| ISSN: | 1552-3810 0093-6502 |
| DOI: | 10.1177/00936502211062773 |
| Popis: | This study is the first to simultaneously investigate country-level and platform-related context factors of toxic outrage, that is, destructive incivility, in online discussions. It compares user comments on the public role of religion and secularism from 2015/16 in four democracies (Australia, United States, Germany, Switzerland) and four discussion arenas on three platforms (News websites, Facebook, Twitter). A novel automated content analysis ( N = 1,236,551) combines LIWC dictionaries with machine learning. The level of toxic outrage is higher in majoritarian than in consensus-oriented democracies and in arenas that afford plural, issue-driven rather than like-minded, preference-driven debates. Yet, toxic outrage is lower in forums that tend to separate public and private conversations than in those that collapse varying contexts. This suggests that user-generated discussions flourish in environments that incentivize actors to strive for compromise, put relevant issues center stage and make room for public debate at a relative distance from purely social conversation. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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