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Commenting or Discussing? Comment Sections of German Russian-Speaking News Media on Facebook

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Social Computing and Social Media: Experience Design and Social Network Analysis (HCII 2021)

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Abstract

Implementation of user comments created a new phase in audience participation. However, high expectations on rational, responsible, and civil user commenting have quickly vanished. Online, people want to interact with others, to express their opinion on the problem, and to teach others. Thus, recent studies criticize the quality of discussions formed in the comment sections on Facebook pages of news media as well as on the news websites. High-quality discussions demand from the participants to actively connect with other participants’ comments. This research aims at exploring the interactivity of discussions that are formed through comments under FB posts published on the news media FB pages. We focus on the media for migrants and, of them, upon those for Russian-speaking migrants in Germany. This group of Internet users tend to be excluded from the public sphere of the host country, but migrant media allow them to join public debate. Thus, two German news FB public pages in Russian with more than 25,000 subscribers in the spring of 2019 were selected for analysis: German News and Germany24. The level of interactivity is measured as the ratio of comments posted in response to another user’s comment to the total number of comments under the post. On average, every third comment to the most commented posts was published as an answer to the comment of another user. Due to the criticism towards comments sections and evidence of absence of a real dialogue, we might seem this average level as a significant one.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. St. Petersburg State University, Universitetskaya nab. 7/9, 199034, St. Petersburg, Russia

    Anna Smoliarova, Svetlana S. Bodrunova & Ekaterina Ivantey

Authors
  1. Anna Smoliarova
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  2. Svetlana S. Bodrunova
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  3. Ekaterina Ivantey
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Correspondence to Anna Smoliarova .

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  1. Department of Computer Science, Towson University, Towson, MD, USA

    Gabriele Meiselwitz

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Smoliarova, A., Bodrunova, S.S., Ivantey, E. (2021). Commenting or Discussing? Comment Sections of German Russian-Speaking News Media on Facebook. In: Meiselwitz, G. (eds) Social Computing and Social Media: Experience Design and Social Network Analysis . HCII 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12774. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77626-8_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77626-8_11

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