Civility?
Animosity in Hate-Filled Comments and Responses
The study is based on 1,051 comments from four conflicting, controversial articles. Only 50% were logical responses to something!
Example
Recently, my letter-to-the-editor was published in the Villages-News, an online local newspaper. Readers are encouraged to make comments. Some were the most hate-filled, ignorant posts I have ever seen, even worse than Twitter. Here are a few examples. I discovered I was a:
Radical Democrat, RINO, communist, Nazi, demoRat, Trumpublican, Brain addled leftist, uneducated cultist, QAnon, Democult, racist fool, homophobe, white supremacist, MAGA, tRumptard, and Republican criminal. Then, I should go back to middle school, visit the priest or Rabbi, lay off the drugs, or drink some Kool-Aid (kill myself). Finally someone said, “His mother should have aborted him, preferable during the third term of the trimester.”
Are hate-filled comments normal?
I wondered if such remarks were typical, or if they were attacking me personally. So, I decided to find out by reviewing 1,051 comments.
