Abstract
This cross-lingual project examines how social media posts of Spanish- and English-language media impact incivility in user comments during the 2020 primary political debates in the United States. We analyzed Facebook posts of news organizations that hosted the debates and used a state-of-the-art machine-learning model to analyze the corresponding comments. Our findings reveal distinct journalistic cultures on the post-level: English-language media are significantly more likely to use interpretation while Spanish-language media employ more audience-engagement and factual reporting strategies. We argue that in order to understand incivility in social media discourse during political debates, we need to consider journalistic cultures: While interpretative reporting explains lower levels of incivility in the English-language discourse, factual reporting explains lower levels of incivility in the Spanish-language discourse. We suggest that we need to consider how features of news reporting (textual and visual) impact discourse quality directly but also indirectly via emotional arousal in comments.
Recommended Citation
L. Hellmueller et al., "The Impact of Journalistic Cultures on Social Media Discourse: US Primary Debates in Cross-Lingual Online Spaces," Digital Journalism, Taylor and Francis Group; Routledge, Jan 2024.
The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2024.2402371
Department(s)
Engineering Management and Systems Engineering
Publication Status
Open Access
Keywords and Phrases
Hispanics; incivility; journalistic cultures; Social media; US election; user comments
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)
2167-082X; 2167-0811
Document Type
Article - Journal
Document Version
Citation
File Type
text
Language(s)
English
Rights
© 2025 Taylor and Francis Group; Routledge, All rights reserved.
Creative Commons Licensing
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Publication Date
01 Jan 2024
