Article and Comment Frames Shape the Quality of Online Comments

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that article framing influences the quality of online comments, with frame-adherent comments being healthier and unhealthy comments generating more unhealthy responses, supported by analysis of 1 million comments.

Contribution

It empirically links framing theory to comment quality and introduces a frame-aware LLM system to mitigate unhealthy discourse.

Findings

Article frames significantly predict comment health.

Comments adopting article frames are healthier.

Unhealthy top comments tend to generate more unhealthy responses.

Abstract

Framing theory posits that how information is presented shapes audience responses, but computational work has largely ignored audience reactions. While recent work showed that article framing systematically shapes the content of reader responses, this paper asks: does framing also affect response quality? Analyzing 1M comments across 2.7K news articles, we operationalize quality as comment health. We find that article frames significantly predict comment health while controlling for topic, and that comments that adopt the article frame are healthier than those that depart from it. Further, unhealthy top-level comments tend to generate more unhealthy responses, independent of the frame being used in the comment. Our results establish a link between framing theory and discourse quality, laying the groundwork for downstream applications. We illustrate this potential with a pro-active frame-aware LLM- based system to mitigate unhealthy discourse.