Document Type

Article

Publication Date

8-13-2018

Publication Title

Social Media and Society

Publisher

Sage

Volume

4

Issue

3

First page number:

1

Last page number:

12

Abstract

This study examines a way to promote civility in online political discussions through modeling discursive cues. An online experiment (N = 321) was conducted to investigate the impact of civil and uncivil discursive cues on participants’ mode of discussion. Results show that participants who were exposed to civil cues were more likely to engage in civil discourse themselves, stay on-topic, and offer additional perspectives in their comments. We also found that metacommunication (i.e., talking about the tone of discussion) engendered more metacommunication. This study illustrates the impact of modeling discursive cues and illuminates the possibility that participants in online discussion can improve their discursive environment.

Keywords

Civility; Political discussion; Modeling; Metacommunication; Online discussion

Disciplines

Communication

File Format

pdf

File Size

189 Kb

Language

English

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License

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