• The Journal of Information Systems
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• v.30 no.4
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• pp.303-327
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• 2021

Purpose The online comments on news content have become social information and are understood based on deliberative democracy. Although the related research has focused on the relationship between online comments and their deliberative quality, the social information provided by online comments consists of not only direct information such as comments themselves but also indirect information such as 'likes' and 'dislikes'. Therefore, the research on online comments and deliberative quality should study this direct and indirect information together, and the direction and the degree of the indirect information should be also considered with them. Design/methodology/approach This study distinguishes comments by the attached 'likes' and 'dislikes', identifies highly supported and highly unsupported comments by the intensity of 'likes' and 'dislikes', and investigates the relationship between their existence and the deliberative quality measured as the topic diversity. Then, we applied topic modeling to the 2,390 news articles and their 74,385 comments collected from five news sites. Findings The topic diversities of the supported and unsupported comments are related to the topic diversity of all comments but the degree of the relationship is higher in the case of supported comments. Furthermore, the existence of highly supported and unsupported comments is led to less diversity of all comments compared to the case where those comments are absent. Particularly, when only highly supported comments are present, topic diversity was lower than in the opposite case.

• Journal of Digital Contents Society
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• v.19 no.8
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• pp.1489-1497
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• 2018

The importance of comments is constantly growing as a participation of individual in Online News that being invigorated. The 'Best Comments', which strongly related by major participants are recognized as a primary public opinion, and obtains the power. Thus this study is aimed to analyze the characteristics of the 'Best Comments' by utilizing the data of comments on Online News. For this study, a possible element that may reveal the difference between 'general' comments and 'best' comments were set up, digitalized the data, and examined the difference between 'general' and 'best' comments. This study is expected to provide a clue for the problematic issues, such as 'online comment rigged scandal' in recent; also as a basic data that subjected by the individual, academic society, government, and etc.

• Journal of Information Technology Services
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.159-176
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• 2015

As a public medium and one of the big data sources that is accumulated informally and real time, online news comments or replies are considered a significant resource to understand mentalities of article readers. The comments are also being regarded as an important medium of WOM (Word of Mouse) about products, services or the enterprises. If the diffusing effect of the comments is referred to as the degrees of agreement and disagreement from an angle of WOM, figuring out which characteristics of the comments would influence the agreements or the disagreements to the comments in very early stage would be very worthwhile to establish a comment-based eWOM (electronic WOM) strategy. However, investigating the effects of the characteristics of the comments on eWOM effect has been rarely studied. According to this angle, this study aims to conduct an empirical analysis which understands the characteristics of comments that affect the numbers of agreement and disagreement, as eWOM performance, to particular news articles which address a specific product, service or enterprise per se. While extant literature has focused on the quantitative attributes of the comments which are collected by manually, this paper used text mining techniques to acquire the qualitative attributes of the comments in an automatic and cost effective manner.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.391-406
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• 2015

As the individual participation in online news sites proliferates, the importance of online news comments has been increasing. Social comment services which help people leave comments on news articles using their own SNS (social networking site) accounts have gained popularity recently. Using data gathered from an online news site, this study, therefore, (1) identifies factors differentiating social comments from general comments, (2) examines how social comments are significantly different from general comments in terms of each factor, (3) and further validates how the social comments' characteristics vary among different type of SNS. Then, we investigated this study by applying t-test, ANOVA, and Duncan test of SPSS Statistics. Our results provide insights on the significant differences in all the factors between general and social comments. We also found that there is a significant difference between Facebook and Twitter groups among three types of SNS. The findings of this study would help assess the actual benefit of social comment services as they may provide us with several valuable leads to solve the malicious comments issue. Moreover, they would suggest the need to apply this service to other areas, such as online environments in private and public sectors.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.434-445
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• 2015

In reading news stories online, people are exposed to others' comments to a news story. In spite of popularity of comments to a news story online, the understanding of why and who posts a comment is still lacking. To complement scarcity and have a better understanding of comment-posting online, this study examined psychological factors which affect the likelihood of posting a comment to a news story online. In particular, three variables were considered: The first variable was communication efficacy, that is, an individual's belief about communication practices and systems, under the supposition that the people who have greater levels of communication efficacy are more likely to post a comment. The second variable was perception of public opinion, to test that when and if people judge their position of the issue as favored by the majority, they tend to post a comment. And finally, the tone of existing comments was included, to test if the tone of comments affects the willingness to post a comment. The results showed that firstly, people at a high level of communication efficacy are more likely to post a comment compared to people at the low level of communication efficacy. Secondly, the perception of public opinion partly influenced the willingness to post a comment. Especially, when people believe communication systems contribute to develop society and also when judged that their opinion is the majority's opinion, they are more likely to post a comment. Finally, the tone of the comments influenced the willingness to post a comment only on the condition that people are confident of the communication practice and are exposed to emotional comments.

• Information Systems Review
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.147-163
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• 2021

We investigate the effect of comment history disclosure on portal news comments. Specifically, based on the scraped news comments from Naver and Daum (two leading Korean news portals), we employ the difference-in-differences estimator to empirically tease out the impact of the comment history disclosure policy implemented in Naver on its news comments. Our result shows that the policy implementation significantly increased the length and the positiveness of online news comments but did not affect their quality.

• The Journal of Society for e-Business Studies
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.173-187
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• 2012

As newspapers which have been major news media are being replaced by on-line news media in recent years, many researchers are paying attention to "comments(news users' short remarks on an article)", a newly emerged way of forming public opinion. This study is examining how the similarity between political disposition of on-line news visitors and that of news media impacts upon their evaluation on quality of comments from the viewpoint of 'social identity theory.' This study may have academic significance because it inspected the pattern of media usage and the cognition of comments in relation to political disposition for the first time and showed 'comments reading' and the function of comments to form public opinion(comments journalism).

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.28 no.2
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• pp.33-55
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• 2022

This study analyzed the comments and the replies on internet news related to the presidential election in order to verify whether online discussions are properly conducted. According to Habermas' public sphere theory, discussions is an effort among participants to reach a social consensus through the deliberations that are based on open communications. We propose that if such discussions properly take place through the act of writing in the Internet space, the comments and the replies will show a certain difference in terms of the structure and the content. To validate, this study analyzed more than 40,000 comments collected from Daum News portal site in Korea. The topic of the related news was the presidential election, because it is a topic of which people are highly interested in and that comments are actively running. The result of the t-test and topic modeling result show that all the hypotheses were supported thus we conclude that online discussions properly took places. This study also showed that online comments are not chaotic remarks that relieve people's stresses, but rather an outcome of the deliberation processes moving towards a social consensus.

• Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.33-48
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• 2019

The current Moon Jai-in administration in South Korea is facing serious challenges as a result of a scandal involving the manipulation of news online. Staff in Moon's camp are suspected of manipulating public opinion by creating millions of fake news comments online, contributing to Moon being elected president. This South Korean political scandal raises a number of theoretical issues with regard to new platform technologies and media manipulation. First, the incident exposes the technological limits of blocking manipulation of the news, partly because of the nature of social media and partly because of the nature of contemporary technology. Contemporary social media is often monopolistic in nature; with the majority of people are using the same platforms, and hence it is likely that they will be subject to forms of media manipulation. Second, the Korean case of news manipulation demonstrates a unique cultural aspect of Korean society. News comments and readers' replies have become a major channel of alternative news in Korea. This phenomenon is often designated as "reply journalism," since people are interested in reading the news replies of ordinary readers equally to reading news reports themselves. News replies are considered indicators of public opinion and are seen as affecting trias politica in Korean society. Third, the Korean incident of news manipulation implicates a new form of populism in the 21st century and the nature of democratic participation. This article aims to explicate key issues in media manipulation by including wider technological, cultural, and political aspects in the South Korean news media context.

• Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.118-141
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• 2019

In South Korea, as awareness of gender equality increased since the 1990s, policies for gender equality and social awareness of equality have been established. Until recently, however, the gap between men and women in social and economic activities has not reached the globally desired level and led to social conflict throughout the country. In this study, we analyze the content of online news comments to understand the public perception of gender equality and the details of gender conflict and to grasp the emergence and diffusion process of emerging issues on gender equality. We collected text data from the online news that included the word 'gender equality' posted from January 2012 to June 2017 and also collected comments on each selected news item. Through text mining and the temporal semantic network analysis, we tracked the changes in discourse on gender equality and conflict. Results revealed that gender conflicts are increasing in the online media, and the focus of conflict is shifting from 'position and role inequality' to 'opportunity inequality'.