Persuasion From Below

An experimental assessment of the impact of anonymous comments sections

Bibliographic Data

ID12909478
AuthorsKevin Wallsten (California State University System, corresponding author), Melinda R Tarsi (Bridgewater State University)
Year2015
Volume10
Issue8
Pages1019-1040
Publication date2015-11-06
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournalism Practice (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1751-2786 • E-ISSN: 1751-2794
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/17512786.2015.1102607
OpenAlexW2283025128
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited70

Guided by the belief that anonymity inevitably breeds the kind of uncivil discourse that hurts their readers, many news organizations have chosen to ban anonymous comments sections on their websites in recent years. Unfortunately, little empirical research has been conducted to assess whether exposure to anonymous comments actually does influence people's attitudes. In this paper, we address this oversight by asking: do anonymous comments posted on a newspaper website shape how internet users feel about the media? Using an online experiment to systematically manipulate exposure to anonymous comments attached to a "hard news" report, we find strong evidence that exposure to non-attributed posts—regardless of their tone—leads internet users to feel more negatively towards specific news organizations and the media in general.KEYWORDS: anonymitycomments sectionsinteractivityjournalismnews mediapublic opinion Notes1. In an examination of 2100 news stories from 50 US newspapers, Santana (Citation2014a) found that controversial news stories were far more likely to appear without commenting forums than non-controversial news stories.2. We compared our sample to data from the US Census, Gallup and the Pew Research Center. Consistent with previous research (Berinsky, Huber, and Lenz Citation2012; Weinberg, Freese, and McElhattan Citation2014), our sample was slightly younger and slightly more liberal than online news consumers, internet users and the population on the whole. Additionally, our sample contained more Asians and fewer blacks than we might expect from a strictly random sample of online news consumers, internet users or the American public. The precise demographic breakdown of our sample can be found in Appendix B.3. Statistical analyses show that none of the demographic variables predicted variation on the treatment group variables; therefore, we are confident that respondents were successfully randomized into one of the four categories.4. Specifically, the questions measuring our two dependent variables read: "We'd like to ask your feelings about particular groups or news sources. Using the 'feeling thermometer' from 0–100, please rate how you feel towards the following groups. A '0' means you feel very unfavorably, a '50' means you feel neither favorably nor unfavorably, and a '100' means you feel very favorably. How do you feel about ... the news media? How do you feel about ... the newspaper USA Today?"5. Of our 646 respondents, 583 (90.2 percent) passed at least two of the three attention checks discussed above.6. The results presented here are derived from an independent samples t-test comparing the mean scores from each of our treatment groups to the mean scores from our control group.7. There is certainly a great deal of research into online incivility but very little of this work explores how anonymity factors into the content of posts on news sites. What is more, this research has produced mixed findings. Some work suggests incivility is common in comments sections (Harrison Citation2009; Singer and Ashman Citation2009; The Engaging News Project Citation2013). Coe, Kenski, and Rains (Citation2014), for example, discovered that 55.5 percent of the article discussions on the Arizona Daily Star's site contained at least some incivility. Similarly, recent work by Santana (Citation2015) found that incivility dominated the comments sections of border state news organizations reporting on immigration issues. Other work, however, paints a different picture. Most notably, Todd Graham's research has shown that degrading exchanges—which are interactions intended to lower another participant's character, quality, esteem or rank—represent less than 15 percent of all posts in comments sections (Graham Citation2010, Citation2012a, Citation2012b; Graham and Witschge Citation2003)

Advertising · Anonymity · Business · Internet privacy · News media · Newspaper · Persuasion · Political science · Population · Sample (material · Sociology · The Internet · World Wide Web · Computer Science · Demography · Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection · Law · Misinformation and Its Impacts · Psychology · Social Media and Politics · Social Psychology

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