The Loud Minority: How a Few Frequent Commenters Shape Digital Discourse with Hostility
Abstract: Digital platforms were expected to foster broad participation in public discourse, yet online engagement remains highly unequal and underexplored. This study examines the digital participation divide and its link to hostile engagement in news comment sections. Analyzing 260 million comments from 6.2 million users over 13 years on \textit{Naver News}, South Korea’s largest news aggregation platform, we quantify participation inequality using the Gini and Palma indexes and estimate hostility levels with a BERT-based deep learning model. The findings reveal a highly skewed participation structure, with a small group of frequent users dominating discussions, particularly in Politics and Society and widely read stories. Participation inequality spikes during presidential elections, and frequent commenters are significantly more likely to post hostile content, suggesting that a vocal, and often hostile, minority disproportionately shapes digital discourse. By leveraging individual-level digital trace data, this study provides empirical insights into the behavioral dynamics of online participation inequality and its broader implications for digital public discourse.
Paper Type: Long
Research Area: Computational Social Science and Cultural Analytics
Research Area Keywords: Digital participation inequality; digital divide; online news comments; online hostility; BERT; Natural Language Processing, Computational Social Science
Languages Studied: Korean
Submission Number: 7870
Loading