Index Comunicación (Oct 2018)
What are you trying to say? A new methodological approach to understand user’s incivility of online news comments
Abstract
Reading uncivil comments associated with online news seems to be common. It is particularly worrisome when dealing with news that discuss public or political issues of a given country, because they disrupt spaces of democratic deliberation. This work is divided into two parts: first, a literature review will be presented to account for the most important elements describing incivility and deliberation online, and secondly, an inductive discourse analysis based on the observation of 4,317 comments from users in a Chilean online media associated with the presidential elections in Chile at the end of 2017 will be presented and discussed. From these comments, it is observed that incivility manifests itself mainly as a polarized discourse on the news and a constant attack on the position of other users, with little use of evidence or arguments with verifiable data.
