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It's the aggression, stupid!: An examination of commenters’ motives for using incivility in online political discussions.

Published: 22 July 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Incivility in online political discussions is an urgent problem for society as it can have detrimental effects on democratic discourse. However, knowledge about people's inherent motives for behaving in an uncivil way is scarce. To close this gap, this online study employed a mixed-methods approach and surveyed 115 discussion commenters to explore their motives for communicating in an uncivil manner. Qualitative analyses revealed that in individual cases, people's motives for uncivil commenting can be very complex, and differ between distinct forms of incivility. Participants also indicated that they often try to counteract other comments. In contrast, quantitative data revealed that motives related to aggression were the key drivers for frequent uncivil commenting behavior among different forms of incivility. In sum, the study demonstrated that although aggressive motives are not the only predictors of uncivil commenting, they still seem to be a key factor for an individual's tendency to write uncivil comments.

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  • (2024)Online and Unkind: Examining the Personality Correlates of Online Political IncivilitySocial Science Computer Review10.1177/08944393241249725Online publication date: 30-Apr-2024

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cover image ACM Other conferences
SMSociety'20: International Conference on Social Media and Society
July 2020
317 pages
ISBN:9781450376884
DOI:10.1145/3400806
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 22 July 2020

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Author Tags

  1. Incivility
  2. motivation
  3. online political discussions
  4. user comments

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SMSociety'20

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Overall Acceptance Rate 78 of 189 submissions, 41%

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  • (2024)Online and Unkind: Examining the Personality Correlates of Online Political IncivilitySocial Science Computer Review10.1177/08944393241249725Online publication date: 30-Apr-2024

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