Suchergebnisse

Incivility in public online discussions has received much scholarly attention in recent years. Still, there is controversy regarding what exactly constitutes incivility and hardly any study has examined in depth what different participants of online discussions perceive as uncivil. Building on a new theoretical approach to incivility as a violation of communication norms, this study aims to close this research gap: In five heterogenous focus groups, different types of actors in online discussions, namely community managers, users, and members of online activist groups, discussed what they perceive as norm-violating and how these violations differ in terms of severity. Results suggest that incivility is a multidimensional construct and that the severity of different norm violations varies significantly. Although the actors share a relatively large common ground as to what they perceive as uncivil, several role-specific perceptions and individual evaluation criteria become apparent. Based on the results, a differentiated typology of perceived incivility in public online discussions is developed.

Incivility is considered a significant challenge for democratic discourse and has been the subject of many studies in a variety of contexts. Although political incivility has a long research tradition, and scholarly attention toward the phenomenon has increased with the advance of social media, there is academic controversy regarding the concept and normative implications of incivility in political contexts. This chapter provides an overview of different incivility approaches in the extant literature, discusses key challenges in incivility research, and outlines normative implications. Further, we suggest future directions for incivility research and argue why an integrative, multidimensional concept of incivility offers great potential for incivility research in the field of political (online) communication.

The proceedings of the Weizenbaum Conference 2021 "Democracy in Flux: Order, Dynamics and Voices in Digital Public Spheres" have been funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research of Germany (BMBF) (grant no.: 16DII121, 16DII122, 16DII123, 16DII124, 16DII125, 16DII126, 16DII127,16DII128 – "Deutsches Internet-Institut").