Abstract
User commentary in digital journalism is commonly understood as a form of public user engagement and participation, a stance that reframes news organizations’ role as discussion curators as necessarily consequential. Yet, in recent years many news organizations have limited, or abandoned altogether, their commentary functions. This paper examines statements and policies published by such news organizations. Based on a thematic analysis of 20 comment removal statements, we found that the most common rationale for this shift was an effort to reduce incivility and misinformation among user comments. The statements analyzed also indicate that organizations are moving to outsource commentary to social media platforms. Tapping into normative discourses of (avoiding) uncivil, conspiracy-prone commentary seems to be an acceptable rationale for abandoning infrastructures established for public discussions or to move these to social media; yet, we found no reflection whatsoever about the additional power afforded to social media companies through such a shift.
Highlights
Digital journalism 2.0 used to provide its readers the opportunity to engage with and debate the news of the day, especially stories related to politics, using the same virtual platform with which the information is accessed (Boczkowski and Mitchelstein 2012; Ruiz et al 2011)
This analysis made legible the value judgements and expected norms news organizations and journalists assign to online user commentary
By reviewing comment removal statements in the aggregate, the patterns of language used and themes addressed in these statements revealed that these news organizations felt that they were up against the same enemy, eventually finding strength in numbers in a maneuver to best unsavory or harmful comment sections
Summary
Digital journalism 2.0 used to provide its readers the opportunity to engage with and debate the news of the day, especially stories related to politics, using the same virtual platform with which the information is accessed (Boczkowski and Mitchelstein 2012; Ruiz et al 2011). The ease of acquiring and engaging with news stories was at first largely viewed as conducive to the type of deliberation required for democratic public engagement, but concerns about the quality of such comments emerged soon thereafter (e.g., Goodman 2013; Ksiazek 2018; Ksiazek and Springer 2020; Liu and McLeod 2021). Serious anxieties in the news industry about the quality of user comments had been well documented over time. Meltzer’s (2015) analysis of more general industry discourse about user comments found widespread concern among news professionals about incivility in comments. In Goodman’s (2013) study for The
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