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Improving the Debate: Interface Elements that Enhance Civility and Relevance in Online News Comments

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Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2021 (INTERACT 2021)

Abstract

Online news websites face an increasing amount of hateful reactions of readers, and reactive attempts at enabling more civil discourse, such as moderation, do not prove sufficient. In this study, we propose a proactive approach to counter anti-social behavior by redesigning the comment section’s interface. We conducted an exploratory online experiment with 255 participants to determine the impact of including a discussion statement related to the news article’s topic in combination with two types of opinion elements. Results reveal a significant positive effect of the novel interfaces on civility and relevance, compared to a traditional comment section (control group). Users evaluated the pragmatic qualities of the traditional comment section significantly more positive compared to the interface with a discussion statement and the continuous opinion element.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The choice to request participants’ name was relevant with the goal of making the experiment as realistic as possible, since many online platforms do not allow anonymous comments. However, during the first days of the pilot study, many respondents left the questionnaire at this stage. Based upon this finding, an ‘anonymous’ option was added, and consequently, the completion rate of the pilot survey increased.

  2. 2.

    Original comments were translated into English.

  3. 3.

    We found no significant impact of anonymity on the comment quality variables.

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Bossens, E., Storms, E., Geerts, D. (2021). Improving the Debate: Interface Elements that Enhance Civility and Relevance in Online News Comments. In: Ardito, C., et al. Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2021. INTERACT 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12935. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85610-6_25

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