Racist comments at online news sites: a methodological dilemma for discourse analysis

TLDR

Since 2004, U.S. newspapers launched comment sections online, but by 2013 most had closed them, and strategies such as disabling comments, not archiving, or aggressive moderation create methodological dilemmas for studying racism in the new public sphere. The article aims to outline methodological pitfalls for investigating racism in online news comments and propose steps for scholars to address these challenges. The authors describe systematic investigative methods and suggest practical steps to navigate the methodological intricacies.

Abstract

In 2004, awash with the hope for a public sphere reinvigorated by the popular internet, the online arms of many U.S. newspapers opened their websites for comments. Now, nine years into this experiment, many newspapers have abandoned the practice of allowing comments. Online news sites have adopted a variety of strategies to deal with offensive comments, including turning “comments off,” not archiving comments, and adopting aggressive comment moderation policies. These strategies present researchers who wish to understand how racism operates in the new public sphere of mainstream news sites with a set of methodological dilemmas. In this article we (1) lay out the methodological pitfalls for the systematic investigation of the prevalent pattern of racism in online comments in the public sphere and (2) suggest steps by which scholars may deal with these methodological intricacies. We conclude by pointing to the broader implications of online content moderation.