Conceptualizing Online Discussion Value: A Multidimensional Framework for Analyzing User Comments on Mass-Media Websites

This chapter provides a micro-framework for analyzing the quantity and quality of online user comments on mass-media websites. On one dimension, news factors of news items and discussion factors of existing user comments are assumed to indicate the relevance of participating in online discussions. On a second dimension, specific motivational, social, and design factors are influential when reconstructing users’ decisions to participate in online discussions and when analyzing the content of online user comments. The two dimensions in combination describe the discussion value of news items. Potential applications of this framework on other forms of interpersonal communication are discussed.

Supplementary_appendix – Supplemental material for Sleeper effect from below: Long-term effects of source credibility and user comments on the persuasiveness of news articles

Supplemental material, Supplementary_appendix for Sleeper effect from below: Long-term effects of source credibility and user comments on the persuasiveness of news articles by Dominique Heinbach and Marc Ziegele in New Media & Society

Communication, Cohesion, and Corona: The Impact of People’s Use of Different Information Sources on their Sense of Societal Cohesion in Times of Crises

Solidarity among society is considered crucial to tackle the corona pandemic. With the crisis evoking a high need for orientation, the information people obtain from different sources may shape whe...

Outfit oder Output?

Nicht nur bei der Prasentation gros angelegter Forschungsprojekte stehen Hochschullehrerinnen und -lehrer verstarkt im Fokus der Offentlichkeit und des interessierten Fachpublikums. Gerade vor dem Hintergrund des zunehmenden Evaluierungsdrucks in der Lehre mussen sie sich auch regelmasig der kritischen Beurteilung durch die Studierenden stellen. Der Ruf, den die Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler bei Studierenden geniesen, konnte dabei masgeblich sowohl von ihrer wissenschaftlichen Reputation als auch von ihrem auseren Auftreten abhangen. In einem Fragebogenexperiment mit 154 Studierenden verschiedener Fachbereiche geht die vorliegende Studie am Beispiel der Merkmale „Kleidungsstil“ u…

The dynamics of online news discussions: effects of news articles and reader comments on users’ involvement, willingness to participate, and the civility of their contributions

ABSTRACTThis study investigates when and why news website visitors write civil or uncivil comments in response to news articles or related user comments. In an experiment, we manipulated the news value of news articles and the presence of ‘deliberative’ or ‘detrimental’ elements of comments to compare their impact on participants’ involvement, willingness to comment, and the comments they posted. News factors and comment characteristics increased participants’ willingness to comment via cognitive and affective involvement. Cognitive involvement made it less likely and affective involvement more likely that participants wrote uncivil comments. Additionally, involvement with previous comments…

What Creates Interactivity in Online News Discussions? An Exploratory Analysis of Discussion Factors in User Comments on News Items

While the social, political, and journalistic relevance of user comments on online news items has been discussed intensively, no study has tried to examine why some online news discussions are more interactive than others. Based on the rationale of news value theory, this study argues that so-called discussion factors in user comments indicate general relevance to later users to respond to them. Qualitative interviews with users who comment on news stories online and a quantitative content analysis of 1,580 user comments showed that the discussion factors uncertainty, controversy, comprehensibility, negativity, and personalization can explain interactivity in news discussions. Further, diff…

Example, please! Comparing the effects of single customer reviews and aggregate review scores on online shoppers' product evaluations

Many websites of online retail stores display two forms of electronic word of mouth on a single product site, namely single customer reviews and aggregate review scores. This study compares the effects of simultaneously presented single customer reviews and aggregate review scores on product evaluations of visitors of online retail stores. We hypothesize that well-argued single customer reviews should be more influential than aggregate review scores that display the mean rating of all published reviews of a product. Drawing on a 2 × 2 factorial online experiment, we show that a single customer review is effective, even when potential buyers do not perceive it as representing overall custome…

Online Hate Does Not Stay Online – How Implicit and Explicit Attitudes Mediate the Effect of Civil Negativity and Hate in User Comments on Prosocial Behavior

Abstract Incivility and hateful language in user comments are met with growing concern among politicians, the general public, and scholars. There are fears that such comments may decrease social cohesion and ultimately result in less prosocial behavior among citizens. We investigate whether hate, or even civil negativity in user comments alone, inhibit actual prosocial behavior through recipients’ explicit and implicit attitudes. In an online experiment, 253 participants read user comments (neutral, civil-negative, hateful) about refugees and received five Euros which they could donate for a refugee aid organization or keep for themselves. The results show that participants confronted with …

Blaming the Victim: The Effects of Extraversion and Information Disclosure on Guilt Attributions in Cyberbullying

Cyberbullying victims' success in coping with bullying largely depends on schoolmates and other bystanders' social support. However, factors influencing the degree of social support have as yet not been investigated. In this article, the concept of victim blaming is applied to cyberbullying incidents. It is assumed that a cyberbullying victim receives less social support when the victim's behavior is perceived as very overt. It is further assumed that this effect's underlying process is the partial attribution of responsibility for the incident to the victim and not to the bully. The hypotheses are tested with a 2×2 online experiment. In this experiment, varying online self-presentations of…

Concepts, causes and consequences of trust in news media – a literature review and framework

Research on trust in media is on the rise. However, communication scholars have addressed related concepts (e.g. media credibility) for decades, and these concepts have often been used interchangea...

Online user comments across news and other content formats: Multidisciplinary perspectives, new directions

Sleeper effect from below: Long-term effects of source credibility and user comments on the persuasiveness of news articles

User comments on news websites are a controversial element of online communication. Various studies have reported the negative effects of comments criticizing the related news articles on readers’ attitudes toward the issues described in these articles. However, these findings are mostly based on measurements directly after the reception of comments. No research has investigated the long-term effects of comments on readers’ article-related attitudes and compared them with the effects of cues emanating from the articles themselves. Therefore, this study transferred the sleeper effect in persuasion to news sites with comment sections. In a 2 × 2-experiment, the persuasiveness of an article w…

Linking News Value Theory With Online Deliberation: How News Factors and Illustration Factors in News Articles Affect the Deliberative Quality of User Discussions in SNS’ Comment Sections

Previous research suggests that distinct characteristics of news articles, such as their news factors, account for the different participation rates in comment sections as well as the degree of interactivity among the discussants. In this study, this assumption is tested in the Facebook environment and extended to the analysis of how news factors (i.e., event characteristics) and illustration factors (i.e., characteristics resulting from a specific journalistic editing) of news articles predict the inclusiveness of discussions, as well as the occurrence of civility, rationality, and deliberative interactivity in user comments. A content analysis of 619 news articles and 11,218 related user…

The digital outcry: What incites participation behavior in an online firestorm?

Brands, celebrities, or politicians are increasingly facing enormous online outrages in response to moral misconducts. These online firestorms are characterized by high message volume, indignant tonality, and negative opinion climate. Based on the concept of moral panics, this article analyzes why people join online firestorms. We argue that participation behavior is driven by a moral compass and a desire for social recognition. Results of an experiment and a content analysis of user comments show that a higher number of participants decreases users’ willingness to participate but fosters compliance with the prevalent opinion and tonality of the comments. We also observe that a higher mora…

Privacy in Social Network Sites

Are we running out of privacy? Nowadays, for example, we are concerned about whether the maintenance of a private sphere in online environments has become a luxury commodity (Papacharissi 2009). Questions of this kind are justified as online communication plays an increasingly important role in people’s everyday life (cf., e.g., Lundby 2009). While it seems exaggerated to stigmatize today’s youth as “communication junkies” (Patalong 2010), online conversations are increasingly becoming a functional equivalent to face to face communication (Beer 2008). However, some significant differences between online and “offline” communication remain. Face to face communication may remain largely intima…

Automatically Detecting Incivility in Online Discussions of News Media

Detecting biased language in written discourse is a highly relevant area of research in political communication and other social sciences, given the large quantity of information exchanged in public online platforms. In this abstract, we discuss an approach based on the concept of "incivility"-assessing biased text on the Facebook pages of established news media. News outlets are forced to put increasing efforts into preventing heated debates from turning into disrespectful discussions on their social media platforms. By scaling the analysis from a few thousand manually coded samples to more than a million comments, we take a step towards supporting media outlets in (semi-)automatizing the …

No place for negative emotions? The effects of message valence, communication channel, and social distance on users’ willingness to respond to SNS status updates

Abstract The present study contributes to the investigation of communicative norms and social support in Social Network Sites (SNSs). We suggest that a positivity bias restricts the availability of social support users receive from others via public responses to negative status updates. Moderated mediation analyses of the data of an online experiment ( N  = 870, M age  = 25.16 years, 64% female) show that users are less willing to comment on negative status updates than on positive ones. In contrast, users are more willing to respond to negative status updates with private messages. These effects are moderated by the strength of the relationship between sender and receiver of the status upd…

A Cross-Cultural Perspective on the Privacy Calculus

The “privacy calculus” approach to studying online privacy implies that willingness to engage in disclosures on social network sites (SNSs) depends on evaluation of the resulting risks and benefits. In this article, we propose that cultural factors influence the perception of privacy risks and social gratifications. Based on survey data collected from participants from five countries (Germany [ n = 740], the Netherlands [ n = 89], the United Kingdom [ n = 67], the United States [ n = 489], and China [ n = 165]), we successfully replicated the privacy calculus. Furthermore, we found that culture plays an important role: As expected, people from cultures ranking high in individualism found i…

Online-Appendix-2 – Supplemental material for Linking News Value Theory With Online Deliberation: How News Factors and Illustration Factors in News Articles Affect the Deliberative Quality of User Discussions in SNS’ Comment Sections

Supplemental material, Online-Appendix-2 for Linking News Value Theory With Online Deliberation: How News Factors and Illustration Factors in News Articles Affect the Deliberative Quality of User Discussions in SNS’ Comment Sections by Marc Ziegele, Oliver Quiring, Katharina Esau and Dennis Friess in Communication Research

Not Funny? The Effects of Factual Versus Sarcastic Journalistic Responses to Uncivil User Comments

Incivility in user comments on news websites has been discussed as a significant problem of online participation. Previous research suggests that news outlets should tackle this problem by interactively moderating uncivil postings and asking their authors to discuss more civilized. We argue that this kind of interactive comment moderation as well as different response styles to uncivil comments (i.e., factual vs. sarcastic) differently affect observers’ evaluations of the discussion atmosphere, the credibility of the news outlet, the quality of its stories, and ultimately observers’ willingness to participate in the discussions. Results from an online experiment show that factual responses…

Who is responsible for interventions against problematic comments? Comparing user attitudes in Germany and the United States

„Das wird man doch noch sagen dürfen…“ – Wahrgenommene Sprechverbote und ihre Korrelate

Die Aufregung ist gros und relativ unabhangig von der politischen Couleur der Aufgeregten: Am 21.10.2019 verhindern Demonstranten eine Lesung des ehemaligen Bundesinnenministers Thomas de Maiziere beim Literaturherbst in Gottingen. Diese wird spater unter Polizeischutz nachgeholt. AfD-Grundungsmitglied Bernd Lucke kann seine Vorlesung zur Makrookonomik II erst nach mehrfachen Anlaufen im Herbst 2019 an der Universitat Hamburg tatsachlich halten.

The interplay of intrinsic need satisfaction and Facebook specific motives in explaining addictive behavior on Facebook

We conducted an online survey with 581 SNS users.We developed a scale measuring SNS addiction.SNS specific motives mediate the effect of intrinsic needs on SNS addiction.People try to compensate thwarted intrinsic needs with gratifications from SNS use.Gratifications sought from SNS use can cause addictive SNS usage patterns. The present paper aims at exploring the new phenomenon of social network site (SNS) addiction and at identifying predictors of problematic SNS use. For this purpose, a scale measuring addictive behavior specifically with regard to SNS use was developed. The effects of intrinsic need satisfaction in the offline context and of SNS-specific motives on SNS addiction were t…