Mapping 'the constructive turn' in comment sections of news websites

The research project critically examines the guidelines of the comments sections of the twenty largest online news outlets over the last ten years. Rather than focusing on the familiar negative comments of news consumers and their narratives, we analyze and compare the news outlets’ guidelines and how they have led in what we call ‘a constructive turn’. We propose our own theoretical framework to analyze what is encouraged and what is discouraged in news outlets’ guidelines. Results show an increasing focus on constructiveness in the guidelines of the comment sections and a shift to more positivity, rather than on deleting and filtering negative or toxic comments. Although platforms differ in their views on the role of commenting and the definition of constructiveness, the turn towards the constructive design of the commenting platform is shared among them.

This dataset contains the commentary guidelines in the top 20 English-language online news websites of December 2020 based on research conducted by Similar Web (Source: Similar Web for Gazette). For each news publication, the current commentary guidelines were scrapped from the internet, alongside earlier versions of their guidelines. In total, three moments were used to map the guidelines: 2021, 2015 and 2010. The content was analysed through coding using Nvivo software. We applied a bottom-up approach - by creating simple codes and eventually grouping them together. Each set of guidelines was coded on what behaviour was encouraged and what was discouraged by the news outlet, and what kind of discussion environment the news outlet expects from their commenters in general (e.g. entertaining, healthy, inclusive etc.). 

This dataset contains coded content for the project. Following logic was used in uploading the documents:

1 - Nvivo project file - can be opened using Nvivo for Mac - contains all information (files, codes, etc.)

We also upload more user-friendly data (the following documents are uploaded in MS Word format):

2 - Codebook (provides the logical structure of coding applied + number of codes for each category)
3 - Code excerpts for discouraged elements found in the content
4 - Code excerpts for encouraged elements found in the content
5 - Code excerpts for discussion environment elements found in the content

Disclaimer: The user-generated content guidelines of news media companies are their own intellectual property and we do not own any rights to it.