• Fellowships
  • Reports
  • Lab
  • Storyboard
    • Nieman Foundation at Harvard
    HOME
    About
    Subscribe
    Archives
              
    Foundation
    Reports
    Storyboard
    LATEST STORY
    What will a second Trump term mean for the Freedom of Information Act?
    Business Models Mobile & Apps Audience & Social Aggregation & Discovery Reporting & Production
    ABOUT                    SUBSCRIBE
    Oct. 22, 2020, 8:27 p.m.
    Audience & Social
    News sites that turn off commenting don’t drive users to social media instead, a study finds
    LINK: mediaengagement.org  ➚   |   Posted by: Hanaa' Tameez   |   October 22, 2020

    Here at Nieman Lab, we’ve been following the discussions around the value of the comments sections for years, as newsrooms have moderated them, changed platforms, and gotten rid of them all together.

    A study published Thursday by the Center for Media Engagement (CME) at the University of Texas, Austin, looked at what comments sections mean to news sites. It found that, for the most part, the comments became less toxic after switching to Coral, the commenting and community platform that Vox acquired from Mozilla in 2019.

    Last December, CME worked with 24 Gannett newsrooms, all of which were had been using Facebook Comments on their sites, and randomly assigned each to do one of the following for a six-week period: Turn off their comments section entirely; continue using Facebook Comments on their site; switch to Coral’s commenting system, which requires registration; or switch to Coral’s commenting system but only let subscribers comment.

    “The commenting platform that was used did affect the level of toxicity,” according to the study’s authors:

    “Overall, sites that adopted Coral had less toxic comments than sites that retained Facebook comments. Averaging by site, sites that switched to Coral for Registrants had 0.05 less toxic comments, sites that switched to Coral for Subscribers had 0.04 less toxic comments, and sites that remained with Facebook had 0.004 less toxic comments. This is not to say, however, that all sites that switched to Coral had less toxic comments (e.g., the Detroit Free Press had slightly more toxic comments). Rather, the aggregate effect across sites is that Coral resulted in fewer toxic comments than Facebook.”

    While comments were less toxic on Coral, the commenters on sites using it reported “feeling more disconnected from other commenters, possibly due to people having new screen names.” However, engagement with the comments section increased when Coral for Registrants was used. The study also found that people spent less time on news sites with no comments section at all, compared to sites with Facebook Comments.

    “Average time on site declined for all sites participating in this study,” the report’s authors write. While “one theory about eliminating comment sections on a news site is that it will drive people to social media,” that didn’t happen in this study, at least not on the news sites’ Facebook pages (the study didn’t look at Twitter):

    “There was no evidence that people commented more frequently on the news organization’s social media page when comments were turned off on the website. The number of comments left each day on the sites’ Facebook pages after the intervention was similar whether the actual news website continued to use the Facebook commenting tool or had no commenting available.”

    Read the full study here.

    Show tags
     
    What’s the best way to follow how the news is changing?
    Our daily email, with all the freshest future-of-journalism news.
    Prefer a once-a-week email? »
    The latest from Nieman Lab
    What will a second Trump term mean for the Freedom of Information Act?
    Andrew Deck
    The Green Line creates local news for the people turning away from “big-J journalism”
    Sophie Culpepper
    Two-thirds of news influencers are men — and most have never worked for a news organization
    Sarah Scire
    The Onion adds a new layer, buying Alex Jones’ Infowars and turning it into a parody of itself
    Joshua Benton
    The Guardian won’t post on X anymore — but isn’t deleting its accounts there, at least for now
    Laura Hazard Owen
    Join the 60,000 who get the freshest future-of-journalism news in our daily email.
    What will a second Trump term mean for the Freedom of Information Act?
    The law itself is likely to stand, but experts expect a surge in requests, longer delays, and more court dates.
    The Green Line creates local news for the people turning away from “big-J journalism”
    The Green Line combines events, explainers, and solutions to appeal to young Torontonians.
    Two-thirds of news influencers are men — and most have never worked for a news organization
    A new Pew Research Center report also found nearly 40% of U.S. adults under 30 regularly get news from news influencers.
    Help advance the Nieman Foundation’s mission “to promote and elevate the standards of journalism” by making a donation.

    To promote and elevate the standards of journalism

    Covering thought leadership in journalism

    Pushing to the future of journalism

    Exploring the art and craft of story
    © 2024 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College  /  Some rights reserved
    Harvard Trademark Privacy Digital Accessibility
    Walter Lippmann House    One Francis Ave.    Cambridge, MA 02138    617 495 2237