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Researchers from the University of Gothenburg have analysed all deleted comments from The Guardian's website between 2006 and 2024, which was 1 million out of a total of 38 million. The results show that hateful comments are posted more quickly than those that are not hateful. This means that the first comments in a thread more often contain hateful language, written in the heat of the moment.
“We conducted a time study of when the comments were written in relation to the publication of the article, or in relation to a comment to which they were a direct response,” says William Hedley Thompson, a researcher at the University of Gothenburg.
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Portrait image of Ben Clarke
Ben Clarke, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Applied Information Technology at the University of Gothenburg.
Photo: Gunnar Jönsson
The researchers also found that if a comment contained hateful content, the likelihood of more hateful comments appearing in the same thread increased. The level of discussion is set by the first comment, and then more readers feel compelled to quickly follow suit.
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Makes sense, the people who are able to comment first would be the ones that haven't actually read the article or just skimmed over it and just have a knee-jerk reaction to the title or something. Maybe a solution is to have not a per-user delay but a global delay, i.e. the comment section doesn't open until some time after the article is published. That won't keep anyone from commenting without reading and reflecting on it, obviously, but it might prevent the knee-jerks from dominating the early comments and limit their influence over the tone of the rest of the comment section.