Structural pluralism and incivility: comparing patterns of moral foundations and incivility in responses to news posts

Abstract

PurposeFocusing on the sociological clarification based on structural pluralism, this study explores the degree to which social media users who comment on the news posts of local newspapers use uncivil remarks and words that reflect their moral foundations.Design/methodology/approachThis computer-assisted data collection produces three types of datasets that include numerous social media comments. To explore the association between moral foundations and incivility, both quadratic association procedure (QAP) and multiple regression QAP (MRQAP) are implemented.FindingsThe findings suggest that social media users who comment on the news posts of urban-located newspapers tend to use more uncivil words compared to social media users who comment on the news posts of suburban and rural-based newspapers. Individuals who comment on the news posts of urban-based newspapers tend to show a wider range of moral foundation spectrums than those who comment on the posts of rural and suburban newspapers. Lastly, there are significant associations between moral-vice components and incivility in response to urban- and suburban-located newspapers' social media posts.Research limitations/implicationsThe employed bag-of-words may not completely capture incivility given that social media users can use nuanced and metaphoric terms instead of explicitly uncivil terms. Even though this study systematically selected local newspapers' social media accounts, the contextual factors of other newspapers in politically slanted communities could be different.Practical implicationsThe findings of this study provide meaningful and practical implications for journalists and news reporters. The inherent rudeness and aggressiveness of social media users can drive them to use uncivil and moral-harm words against a particular person or group.Social implicationsUnder the circumstance that fake news and politically slanted news content are widely distributed in the United States, social media users may easily express negative emotions toward news stories or the journalists who post the stories.Originality/valueStructural pluralism particularly specializes in explaining why and how the contextual factors of news stories differ depending on community complexity. Building on the reasoning of structural pluralism in the social media context, this study investigates the degree to which social media users who comment on the news posts of local newspapers employ uncivil remarks and moral foundation words.Peer reviewThe peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-11-2020-0522.