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The German Comment Landscape

A Structured Overview of the Opportunities for Participatory Discourse on News Websites

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Disinformation in Open Online Media (MISDOOM 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 12887))

Abstract

Online comment sections revolutionised the participatory discourse as enabled by news media, limiting the hurdles to participate and speeding up the process from submission to publication. What was initially meant to strengthen public debates and democracy turned out to suffer from abusive use: Be it insulting journalists, posting misinformation, or pure hate. While many publishers and journalists are eager to create an engaged audience, user-generated content typically does not create direct revenues. However, keeping the abuse at bay is often obligatory from an ethical and legal perspective and can be costly. Germany has been highly affected by abuse in combination with strict regulation, leading to the shutdown of many comment sections. While reports in 2014 indicated closure rates of 50% and more, a structured overview of the situation in 2020/21 is missing. We conducted a structured assessment of 114 German newspaper websites containing all major outlets to account for this. Our analyses indicate that the deteriorating trend regarding the availability of comment sections slowed down in Germany. However, there are still open issues such as a high number of outlets using post-moderation and limited audience participation options. This provides a reference to researchers and practitioners working on (semi-) automated moderation systems regarding the expectable market and problem size.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    official German name: Bundesverband Digitalpublisher und Zeitungsverleger (BDZV); https://www.bdzv.de/.

  2. 2.

    To normalise different amounts of publishing days only circulations from Monday to Friday were taken into consideration.

  3. 3.

    The Badische Zeitung blocks profiles created with data such as “Musterstraße 13” (“Sample Street 13”) and “Musterhausen; PLZ 12345” (“Sample City; ZIP: 12345”).

  4. 4.

    https://www.bild.de.

  5. 5.

    https://www.borkumer-zeitung.de.

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Acknowledgments

The research leading to these results received funding from the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia and the European Regional Development Fund (EFRE.NRW 2014–2020), Project: (No. CM-2-2-036a).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department for Information Systems, University of Münster, Leonardo-Campus 3, 48149, Münster, Germany

    Marco Niemann, Kilian Müller, Chantal Kelm, Dennis Assenmacher & Jörg Becker

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  1. Marco Niemann
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  4. Dennis Assenmacher
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  5. Jörg Becker
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Marco Niemann .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Jonathan Bright

  2. Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Anastasia Giachanou

  3. University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

    Viktoria Spaiser

  4. Boise State University, Boise, ID, USA

    Francesca Spezzano

  5. University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Anna George

  6. University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Alexandra Pavliuc

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Niemann, M., Müller, K., Kelm, C., Assenmacher, D., Becker, J. (2021). The German Comment Landscape. In: Bright, J., Giachanou, A., Spaiser, V., Spezzano, F., George, A., Pavliuc, A. (eds) Disinformation in Open Online Media. MISDOOM 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12887. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87031-7_8

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