Polarisation in Comments on News Outlets’ Facebook Pages

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Edda Humprecht, whose focus is on polarisation on Facebook. There is evidence of considerable negativity on this platform, and this may affect users’ perceptions of the world around them; in particular, it may increase their perception of societal polarisation. News outlets operating on the platform are now often accepting negative comments because they do not want to be seen to be censoring user comments – yet at the same time they are complaining about the negative aspects of user participation on social media.

Potential drivers for such negativity may include societal and political polarisation, which shapes political communication cultures and increases negativity in user discourses. Polarisation may also shape journalistic norms, especially when it comes to how news organisations deal with user comments. In commercial media markets, negativity may also be a selling point as it is attracting audiences. Further, specific issues may trigger strongly negative responses, and partisan news outlets may indeed actively foster such negativity by the issues they cover.

How do such dynamics play out across different country contexts, then? The project examined the situation across the U.S. and Germany, and across selected broadsheet, mass market, and hyperpartisan news outlets. It examined some 244,000 user comments posted to these outlets’ Facebook pages during once week in February 2017, and found that U.S. comments tended more strongly negative than in Germany, and more strongly negative in hyperpartisan outlets.

In both contexts, Donald Trump – then freshly inaugurated – featured strongly, and the refugee debate was central; only U.S. comments focussed in any significant way on the Democratic Party, while more Germany comments were negative about ‘the media’. Targets of negativity also varied to some extent, in line with the specific political points of focus across the two countries.

Negative comments were pervasive overall in the U.S., while in Germany only certain topics triggered strongly negative, polarising debates. Hyperpartisan outlets in particular provoke polarised debates, in part to earn money from such interactions.