No comments: Addressing commentary sections in websites' analyses

TL;DR

This paper investigates the impact of commentary sections on website analysis, demonstrating their potential to bias results and proposing guidelines for their removal or extraction, especially in controversial content like anti-vaccine sites.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic approach to identify and handle commentary sections in website analysis, highlighting their influence on bias and providing practical guidelines.

Findings

Commentary sections can bias website content analysis.

Analyzing commentary sections is valuable for understanding controversy.

Guidelines for removing or extracting commentary sections are proposed.

Abstract

Removing or extracting the commentary sections from a series of websites is a tedious task, as no standard way to code them is widely adopted. This operation is thus very rarely performed. In this paper, we show that these commentary sections can induce significant biases in the analyses, especially in the case of controversial Highlights $\bullet$ Commentary sections can induce biases in the analysis of websites' contents $\bullet$ Analyzing these sections can be interesting per se. $\bullet$ We illustrate these points using a corpus of anti-vaccine websites. $\bullet$ We provide guidelines to remove or extract these sections.