Incivility in comments posted on news outlets’ Facebook pages

What is it about?

This study of the landscape of incivility embedded in the Facebook news environment has shown that, over an 18 month period in 2015–2016, liberal news on the social network elicited the highest proportion of civil discourse. Among uncivil comments, those on liberal-news and national-news pages were less likely to be extremely uncivil than those on conservative-news and local-news ones, on which approximately one out of every five comments contained explicit language or clear expressions of malice. Local-news outlets’ pages were the most uncivil environments overall and contained approximately equal levels of personal and impersonal uncivil comments, whereas all three of the other types of pages we studied had a greater number of impersonal uncivil comments than personal ones.

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Why is it important?

This study’s exploration of the intensity and directionality of incivility in Facebook comments differs from the approaches of previous studies that focused on nuanced differences between specific rhetorical techniques (e.g. name-calling, aspersions, and vulgarity). As well as intensity and directionality, it delved into news-outlet type: an important contextual factor for Facebook users’ experience of news consumption. The discrepancies in the volume and intensity of uncivil user-generated comments across different types of news outlets’ Facebook pages carry important implications and opportunities for reflection, both for communication scholars and for journalistic practitioners seeking a better understanding of the online commenting environment and of existing and potential comment-management strategies.