Article and Comment Frames Shape the Quality of Online Comments
For researchers and platform designers, this establishes a link between framing theory and discourse quality, enabling proactive interventions to mitigate unhealthy discourse.
This paper investigates whether framing in news articles and comments affects the quality of online comments, measured as 'comment health' (constructive, good-faith contributions). Analyzing 1M comments across 2.7K articles, they find that article frames significantly predict comment health, comments adopting the article frame are healthier, and unhealthy top-level comments generate more unhealthy responses.
Framing theory posits that how information is presented shapes audience responses, but computational work has largely ignored audience reactions. While recent work showed that article framing systematically shapes the content of reader responses, this paper asks: Does framing also affect response quality? Analyzing 1M comments across 2.7K news articles, we operationalize quality as comment health (constructive, good-faith contributions). We find that article frames significantly predict comment health while controlling for topic, and that comments that adopt the article frame are healthier than those that depart from it. Further, unhealthy top-level comments tend to generate more unhealthy responses, independent of the frame being used in the comment. Our results establish a link between framing theory and discourse quality, laying the groundwork for downstream applications. We illustrate this potential with a proactive frame-aware LLM- based system to mitigate unhealthy discourse