The Impact of Journalistic Cultures on Social Media Discourse: US Primary Debates in Cross-Lingual Online Spaces

This cross-lingual project examines how social media posts of Spanish- and English-language media impact incivility in user comments during the 2020 primary political debates in the United States. We analyzed Facebook posts of news organizations that hosted the debates and used a state-of-the-art machine-learning model to analyze the corresponding comments. Our findings reveal distinct journalistic cultures on the post-level: English-language media are significantly more likely to use interpretation while Spanish-language media employ more audience-engagement and factual reporting strategies. We argue that in order to understand incivility in social media discourse during political debates, we need to consider journalistic cultures: While interpretative reporting explains lower levels of incivility in the English-language discourse, factual reporting explains lower levels of incivility in the Spanish-language discourse. We suggest that we need to consider how features of news reporting (textual and visual) impact discourse quality directly but also indirectly via emotional arousal in comments.