Can News Comment Sections Be More Deliberative?

• In Event: New Media and Political Deliberation

Abstract

Drawing from classical understandings of deliberative democracy, we investigate the extent to which newsroom practices influence the quality of online comment sections. To determine whether newsroom engagement with commenters, conversation prompts to encourage commenting, or the issue focus of news posts influenced the deliberative quality of comments, we conducted a field quasi-experiment with a local television news station in a top-50 DMA. Over 70 days, the station randomly engaged in several forms of interaction with commenters on the station’s Facebook page when posting a political story. We assessed these behaviors against seven deliberative indicators in user comments (n=2,408), including replies, relevance, civility, and linked information. The findings reveal that newsrooms can influence the deliberative quality of comment sections accompanying news stories.

Authors

• Natalie Jomini Stroud, U of Texas

• Joshua M. Scacco, Purdue University

• Ashley Muddiman, U of Wyoming

• Alexander L Curry, University of Texas at Austin