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comment sections
Comment sections are online spaces where people discuss a wide variety of topics, including the news. While often hosted on the websites of news publishers, comment sections are also increasingly popular on social media platforms, for example, underneath news story links shared through the social media pages and profiles of news outlets. Comment sections are widely understood as vital venues for the health of democratic societies, as they allow people to exchange their opinions on a wide range of topics. Comment sections have recast the relationship between journalists, as the producers of news content, and their audiences, and they provide agency for news readersāto interact with journalists, to provide feedback, to point out mistakes in a story, and to talk to others.
As comment sections invite people to air divergent opinions, they are spaces prone to incivility or other types of problematic speech and necessitate that user debates are kept in check. Comment sections, therefore, are also important fields in which the acceptability of certain types of speech is tested and negotiated. While news outlets attempt to maintain civility in comment sections by various forms of moderation and by articulating policies of acceptable speech, moderating comments itself is a labor-intensive endeavor, and not all news outlets want to or can dedicate the necessary amount of resources to it.
Short History of Comment Sections
The history of comment sections dates to the late 1990s, with individual news outlets establishing commenting functions underneath news stories. Far from a novel idea, predecessors of comment sections were discussion boards that existed on a variety of digital services. News outlets slowly picked up on providing comment functions, hesitant at first to introduce the possibility for readers to leave their opinions directly and uninhibited in spaces formerly exclusively populated by professional journalists. Letters to the editor had been a common feature of the news well before. But unlike comments, these were editorially selected items, picked from a number of submissions. Comment sections, on the other hand, posed an agential threat to the position of power that journalists hold, as they would allow anyone to air their opinions on anything.
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In the early days of comment sections, comments were policed less. Slowly but steadily, the provision of spaces for debate became the norm across news sites as well as other platforms until around 2013, when some outlets such as Popular Science began to do away with their comment sections altogether. Other news outlets such as the Chicago Sun-Times and National Public Radio followed. News organizations that got rid of their comment sections cited a variety of reasons, including the financial impact of having to invest in teams to keep comment sections clean and the fact that large swaths of readers had moved over to comment on news stories on social media platforms where the stories were shared. As the dynamics of digital spaces changed, the majority of online debates were unfolding on social media platforms.
Three Perspectives on Comment Sections
Comment sections assume an important role in society, as they are spaces for deliberation and debate. Intricately connected to institutions that provide comment sections are the rules by which comment sections are governedābe that informally, through norms of debate that are long-honed and cultural, or more concretely, through community guidelines that news outlets or social media sites have articulated. As comment sections have permeated life on the Internet, it is important to consider the people who comment online, as well as the psychology of comment sections. The sections below parse the subject of comment sections in the domains of democracy, institutional questions, and social aspects associated with it.
Democracy and the Role of Commenting in Society
Comment sections have been hailed as spaces that allow for deliberation to unfold, a digital version of public squares that allow for people to come together and have debates about political ideas. The German philosopher JĆ¼rgen Habermasās theorizing on deliberative democracy is instrumental in thinking about online comments as a venue for the reasoned exchange of opinions that is crucial for democratic societies. As such, comment sections provide for citizens to discuss the important issues of the time, to hear countering opinions, and to not only inform themselves about the news but also engage with it and participate. News outlets operating as democratic arbiters of information and as the fourth estate, in charge of keeping checks and balances on the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government, may extend their democratic claims to not only provide information for citizens but also to provide spaces to discuss such information. Most research, however, shows that comments fail to live up to these deliberative ideals. Hosting spaces of debate is accompanied by responsibilities such as maintaining civility among commenters.
Incivility is one of the most studied and most prevalent issues that comment sections are facing. While some commenters may argue that even their most hateful and vile statements are protected by freedom of expression principles, this may not be true, because private corporations that host comment spaces do not have to allow all types of speech. Rather, they have to navigate thresholds of acceptability. While some content might be disconcerting, it may still be important for a fruitful debate or drive traffic toward economic goals of the platform. Other content, however, could be so disconcerting that it is assumed never to produce meaningful debate, and news outlets (and other platforms) need to make difficult decisions on how to identify and remove such content.
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Institutional Approaches to Commenting
Comment sections have fundamentally recast the relationship between journalists and news audiences. They are important as they personify a paradigm of an active audience, or participatory journalismāfamously described by journalism professor Jay Rosen in a blog post as āthe people formerly known as the audience.ā News outlets tasked with dealing with commenters often delegate comment moderationāthe oversight of reader comments, intervention, and, possibly, deletion of problematic contentāto journalists themselves. As the field of comment moderation professionalized, community managers started to be put in place, charged with moderation. This was accompanied by technological solutions that would make it easier for news outlets to deal with large numbers of comments that needed to be checked for violating terms of service. Contemporary comment moderation systems typically employ combinations of technological solutions in which algorithms filter problematic content and human oversight over difficult decisions.
Different regimes of comment moderation may be put in place, some of which employ premoderation before a comment gets published, and some may constitute postmoderation. Premoderation strategies may involve manual screening and approval or disapproval of comments by human editors, or computer-assisted techniques in which algorithms predict which comments should or should not be published. Postmoderation, on the other hand, typically involves moderators getting involved once content has been flagged by users or otherwise brought to the attention of moderators. Moderators can swoop in after the comments are already published and weed out the ones that do not align with the rules of the platform. Because moderation is very specific to the style, scope, and size of the host of the debate, models of moderation can involve professional moderators (who may even intervene or respond to comments, instead of only deleting) or volunteer moderators. On social media platforms, moderation efforts can constitute multilayered models, in which rules of the news outlet as well as rules of the social media platform might apply to what is acceptable to post.
Social Aspects of Commenting
Comment sections are inherently social enterprises. Their success or demise depends on the people who participate in them and the ways in which they do so. Psychologist John Suler has described a phenomenon he calls the online disinhibition effect, which posits that people are less inhibited to post and say certain things online than they are elsewhere. Indeed, content analyses commonly show that about a fifth of all comments are somewhat uncivil.
Commenter demographics are often more male and older than the general population, and it is important to consider who does and who does not participate in online comments, for a variety of reasons. People who are members of minority groups may be less prone to comment altogether if they know that there is the possibility of being harassed. Even if only a small share of all readers may comment themselves, comment sections may be interesting to others. So-called ālurkersā are people who do not comment themselves but who read what others have to say. While deliberation is what academics often argue is the primary merit of comment sections, a more tangible benefit for individual users may be the sense of community and belonging that online spaces can produce.
Comment sections can be boon and baneāthey may drive traffic for news outlets, but negative content attached to the bottom of a news article can also lead to negative overall perceptions of a news outlet. Similarly, research has established that there are negative effects associated with reading certain comments, as well as exhaustion for those people who are in charge of sifting through comments. The ways in which the Internet operates give primacy to controversial and inflammatory content. In this vein, operators of comment sections may be interested in a certain level of uncivil debate to keep the forum interesting but need to be mindful of the negative effects of how people may perceive this bleeding over on the image of the outlet itself.
The original version of this article was published by SAGE Publications in The SAGE Encyclopedia of Journalism.