Article and Comment Frames Shape the Quality of Online Comments

ACL ARR 2026 January Submission6834 Authors

Keywords: Computational Social Sciences, Framing, Discourse and Pragmatics, Media, Opinion Mining

Abstract: Framing theory posits that how information is presented shapes audience responses, but computational work has largely ignored audience reactions. While recent work showed that article framing systematically shapes the content of reader responses, this paper asks: does framing also affect response quality? Analyzing 1M comments across 2.7K news articles, we operationalize quality as comment health (constructive, good-faith contributions). We find that article frames significantly predict comment health while controlling for topic, and that comments that adopt the article frame are healthier than those that depart from it. Further, unhealthy top-level comments tend to generate more unhealthy responses, independent of the frame being used in the comment. Our results establish a link between framing theory and discourse quality, laying the groundwork for downstream applications. We illustrate this potential with a pro-active frame-aware LLM-based system to mitigate unhealthy discourse.

Paper Type: Short

Research Area: Computational Social Science, Cultural Analytics, and NLP for Social Good

Research Area Keywords: frame detection and analysis, NLP tools for social analysis, quantitative analyses of news and/or social media

Languages Studied: Python

Submission Number: 6834