Commenting on social media posts: Do message position and incivility encourage or discourage commenting?

Title: Commenting on social media posts: Do message position and incivility encourage or discourage commenting?

Presenter(s): Xudong Yu

Abstract: Political expression plays a vital role in the healthy functioning of society. This project focuses on identifying the conditions that attenuate or enhance the likelihood that social media users comment on other people ’s social media posts. We focus on two factors: the position of the original post, whether pro- or counter-attitudinal with regard to a person, and incivility, whether the tone of the original post is civil or uncivil. Relying on two studies using (1)  behavioral trace data from Twitter as well as (2) online experimental data from a sample of American adults collected by Survey Sampling International, we examine how (1) positions of tweets and mock Facebook posts, influence their commenting behavior, (2) incivility of the original post or Facebook post affects people’s willingness to engage with the content, and (3) these two factors interact and how this interaction influences users’ political self-expression on social media. Additionally, in the online experiment, we test whether these effects depend on the ideology of the commenter.