Shea Ashley L, Omapang Aspen K B, Cho Ji Yong, Ginsparg Miryam Y, Bazarova Natalie N, Hui Winice, Kizilcec René F, Tong Chau, Margolin Drew B
Department of Communication, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, United States of America.
Department of Information Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2025 Aug 20;20(8):e0328550. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0328550. eCollection 2025.
Social media platforms increasingly serve as the primary place where people participate in public conversations about news. In these conversations, ad hominem attacks are quite common. Such ad hominem attacks might be influenced by underlying cognitive or affective goals, such as to discredit a purveyor of falsified evidence or to signal social distance from a hateful provocateur. They may also be driven by a simple operative goal: to stop what was said. When ad hominem attacks are used to stop the comments of another person, we refer to it as a discursive objection tactic. In this paper, we explore the prevalence of ad hominem attacks and characteristics of other discursive tactics used by people when objecting to online news commentary. First, we conducted a content analysis of more than 6,500 comment replies to trending news videos on YouTube and Twitter and identified seven distinct discursive objection tactics. Second, we examined the frequency of each tactic's occurrence from the 6,500 comment replies, as well as from a second sample of 2,004 replies. Our findings confirm that while ad hominem attacks are the most common discursive tactic used to object to news commentary, people also deploy a diversity of other discursive objection tactics. The resulting typology offers a comprehensive account of grassroots efforts which utilize deterrent speech, nonaccommodative communication and prosocial strategies.
社交媒体平台日益成为人们参与有关新闻的公共对话的主要场所。在这些对话中，人身攻击相当常见。此类人身攻击可能受到潜在认知或情感目标的影响，比如诋毁虚假证据的传播者，或表明与可恨的挑衅者保持社会距离。它们也可能由一个简单的操作目标驱动：阻止他人发言。当人身攻击被用于阻止他人评论时，我们将其称为话语反对策略。在本文中，我们探讨了人身攻击的普遍程度以及人们在反对在线新闻评论时使用的其他话语策略的特点。首先，我们对YouTube和Twitter上超过6500条针对热门新闻视频的评论回复进行了内容分析，并确定了七种不同的话语反对策略。其次，我们研究了每种策略在这6500条评论回复以及另外2004条回复样本中的出现频率。我们的研究结果证实，虽然人身攻击是用于反对新闻评论的最常见话语策略，但人们也会采用多种其他话语反对策略。由此产生的类型学全面描述了利用威慑性言论、不包容沟通和亲社会策略的草根努力。
