Assault for assault: award-winning study reveals dynamics of hostile comments on social media
"What a nasty girl," could be a comment on any social network, but it is also the title of one of the recent investigations of Magdalena Saldaña, an academic at the Faculty of Communications of the Catholic University of Chile and researcher at the Millennium Institute of Communications and Communications at the Catholic University of Chile. Millennium Institute Foundational Research on Data y Valentina Proust, professor at the Catholic University of Chile.. In this study, the researchers dive into the world of social network comments to analyze the dynamics that give rise to aggressions among users, especially how gender affects them.
"Men are significantly more aggressive than women on social networks, which was a result we expected. However, we found that women do not necessarily, receive more hostility, which was an unexpected result." The explanation for this finding has to do with how a conversation is initiated on social networks. The literature has found that when a person is aggressive, they get responses that are also aggressive. Since incivility attracts more incivility, men tend to post uncivil comments and therefore also receive more uncivil responses," explains Magdalena Saldaña. And when a person is not aggressive, she points out, "they may receive aggressive comments, but most likely this is not the case, and if you show yourself to the world in a civilized manner, you will most likely receive non-aggressive comments in response.
And women tend to comment in a normal way, Saldaña points out, which does not happen in the case of men: they receive more hostility because they start by commenting in a very aggressive way. "They start trolling, then those who respond to them do so in an uncivil manner." One of the conclusions of the study is that the more women are present in the conversation, the better the level of civility, since they do not initiate aggressive conversations and a dialogue or exchanges without hostility can be developed".
The study recently earned double recognition from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC): "Top Faculty Paper"awarded by the Commission on the Status of Women; and second place in research on Latin America, "Latin/Latin American Communication Research Award".Latino/Latin American Communication Research Award"given by the International Communication division of AEJMC. These awards highlight both the quality and the results of the research, which positions the study, conducted in the context of Latin America and Chile, at a global level.
"What a nasty girl: Incivility and gendered symbolic violence in news discussions".was carried out using data collected from news comments on Radio Bío Bío's Facebook page during a limited period, information that was systematized by a team of IMFD researchers, with the aim of measuring the levels of trolling and incivility in news comments. This study is one of the analyses carried out with this information, which has been worked on from different research angles. The infrastructure generated by IMFD to perform the analysis -created by Juan Reutter, DCC UC academic and IMFD researcher, and Florencia Barrios, P. Universidad Católica de Chile- "is the one that allows us to analyze in depth and study the behavior of People in social networks, particularly in news comments. This article is an example of what we can achieve with the interdisciplinary work of the IMFD", Saldaña highlights.
In addition to its outstanding results, the study is also positioned in the waves of feminist movements that have emerged in Latin America, which are giving an important boost to gender studies in various areas, so that for Magdalena Saldaña, "it is likely that we will continue to deepen in this type of issues, which are becoming particularly relevant in our society".