Search

Journalists, scholars, and citizens have raised concerns regarding the high share of incivility in comment sections of news outlets. The current study surveyed members of the social movement #ichbinhier, which aims at collectively countering uncivil comments to cultivate a civil discussion atmosphere in comment sections. We root the activities of #ichbinhier as corrective action and identify the determinants of the members’ engagement by integrating research on bystander behavior and collective action. The findings of our survey show that factors pertaining to individual skills, perceived responsibility, and expected benefits relate to the members’ likelihood to engage against uncivil online comments. Regarding factors derived from collective action research, group efficacy and knowledge of the rules and structures of the movement account for higher levels of engagement. These results shed light on the factors that motivate and inhibit #ichbinhier members—and, potentially, Facebook users in general—to engage against uncivil comments.

Comment sections below news articles are public fora in which potentially everyone can engage in equal and fair discussions on political and social issues. Yet, empirical studies have reported that many comment sections are spaces of selective participation, discrimination, and verbal abuse. The current study complements these findings by analyzing gender-related differences in participation and incivility. It uses a sample of 303,342 user comments from 14 German news media Facebook pages. We compare participation rates of female and male users as well as associations between the users’ gender, the incivility of their comments, and the incivility of the adjacent replies. To determine the incivility of the comments, we developed a Supervised Machine Learning Model (classifier) using pre-trained word embeddings and word// frequency features. The findings show that, overall, women participate less than men. Comments written by female authors are more civil than comments written by male authors. Women’s comments do not receive more uncivil replies than men’s comments and women are not punished disproportionately for communicating uncivilly. These findings contribute to the discourse on gender-related differences in online comment sections and provide insights into the dynamics of online discussions.

The study investigates the flagging behavior as specific type of bystander intervention against uncivil user comments in comments sections on news sites. Two experimental studies examine the effects of intervention information, characteristics of response comments, and the type of victim attacked in a comment on flagging behavior, that is on reporting a comment to professional moderators. Our results indicate that intervention information is a promising strategy to motivate flagging. Flagging is based on responsibility attribution to professional moderators but not on self-responsibility perception. Type of victim and characteristics of other users’ posted responses to preceding comments (public disagreement and politeness) shape deviance perceptions of the situation and influence flagging behavior.