Discursive objection strategies in online comments: Developing a classification schema and validating its training
This provides a classification schema for understanding grassroots objection strategies to harmful speech in online comments, which is an incremental contribution to content moderation research.
The researchers analyzed over 8,500 comment replies on YouTube and Twitter to identify seven distinct discursive strategies people use to object to harmful speech online, finding that reputational attacks are the most common approach.
Most Americans agree that misinformation, hate speech and harassment are harmful and inadequately curbed on social media through current moderation practices. In this paper, we aim to understand the discursive strategies employed by people in response to harmful speech in news comments. We conducted a content analysis of more than 6500 comment replies to trending news videos on YouTube and Twitter and identified seven distinct discursive objection strategies (Study 1). We examined the frequency of each strategy's occurrence from the 6500 comment replies, as well as from a second sample of 2004 replies (Study 2). Together, these studies show that people deploy a diversity of discursive strategies when objecting to speech, and reputational attacks are the most common. The resulting classification scheme accounts for different theoretical approaches for expressing objections and offers a comprehensive perspective on grassroots efforts aimed at stopping offensive or problematic speech on campus.