Abstract
ABSTRACT News comments are a great space for citizen interaction, albeit they lack the rationale that would account for an online deliberative space. Through an experiment embedded into a population-based survey, this study seeks to explain how different levels of both incivility and disagreement affect readers on two key variables: negative emotions and user participation. Results show that the exposure to both incivility alone and uncivil disagreement increases negative emotions by the reader, such as anxiety and anger. However, contrary to what literature suggested, incivility by itself was the group with the biggest increase on negative emotions. In terms of online participation (e.g. putting an extra like in a comment), results showed no evidence to indicate a relationship between incivility, disagreement, and online participation. These results support previous findings suggesting that the exposure to online political incivility has mainly negative consequences.
Published Version
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