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This study argues that online user comments on social media platforms provide feedback and evaluation functions. These functions can provide services for the relevant departments of organizations or institutions to formulate corresponding public opinion response strategies.

This study considers Chinese universities’ public opinion events on the Weibo platform as the research object. It collects online comments on Chinese universities’ network public opinion governance strategy texts on Weibo, constructs the sentiment index based on sentiment analysis and evaluates the effectiveness of the network public opinion governance strategy adopted by university officials.

This study found the following: First, a complete information release process can effectively improve the effect of public opinion governance strategies. Second, the effect of network public opinion governance strategies was significantly influenced by the type of public opinion event. Finally, the effect of public opinion governance strategies is closely related to the severity of punishment for the subjects involved.

The theoretical contribution of this study lies in the application of image repair theory and strategies in the field of network public opinion governance, which further broadens the scope of the application of image repair theory and strategies.

This study expands online user comment research to network public opinion governance and provides a quantitative method for evaluating the effect of governance strategies.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-05-2022-0269

This study examined how likeminded Facebook comments with incivility and without supporting evidence influence readers' evaluations of the commenter and online political participation intention. This study also investigated whether the indirect effect of exposure to uncivil comments and comments without evidence on online political participation through evaluations of the commenters is contingent on the strength of partisanship.

The study used a 2 (uncivil comments vs civil comments) × 2 (comments without supporting evidence vs comments with supporting evidence) factorial design with a scenario about reading similar viewpoints about the gun control issue in Facebook comments.

The results showed that compared to exposure to civil agreeing comments, exposure to uncivil likeminded comments resulted in higher levels of negative evaluations of the commenters, which in turn decreased willingness to participate in political activities online. Exposure to comments without evidence led to more negative evaluations of the commenters, but it did not significantly influence online political participation. In addition, the strength of partisanship did not significantly moderate the indirect effect of exposure to uncivil comments and comments without evidence on online political participation through evaluations of the commenters.

Although previous studies have demonstrated the significant effects of incivility and reasoned argument, little is known about whether and how people evaluate ingroup members' comments that are uncivil and lacking reasoned arguments. Most of these studies have examined incivility in political contexts, but few have extended the context to the effect of likeminded comments, especially when the comments are uncivil and lack supporting evidence. The current study aims to fill this gap in the literature.

The purpose of this paper is to qualitatively understand the reactions of online publics to a victim cluster crisis as the crisis unfolds and offer a new way of tracking online hot-issue publics using comments on online news articles.

This research uses a mixed-methods approach, employing both descriptive quantitative techniques and qualitative thematic analysis.

Qualitative analyses of online news comments on BuzzFeed and the Huffington Post revealed that publics’ reaction to the cyber-attack on Sony, the following threats of attack, and Sony’s response to it largely ran counter to the situational crisis communication theory’s (SCCT) assumptions about victim cluster crises. Analyses also revealed a pattern in the volume of comments on the two online news outlets, supporting the conceptualization of hot-issue publics growing and decreasing as news coverage of an issue rises and falls.

The analysis was limited to one incident and two online media.

This paper provides empirical support for the use of online news comments to track hot-issue publics and what is important to them. In addition, tracking the tone and content of the comments allows for an examination of the fit of SCCT assumptions and provides a way for practitioners to understand public opinion and adapt communication plans based on insights gleaned from such data.

This study is one of few to provide empirical support for the conceptualization of hot-issue publics, and to do so using online news comments. In addition, it is one of very few to study the SCCT in real-world settings, examining real publics’ reactions to real issues.

To examine the relationship between online comments, merchant replies and online sales of tourism products and focus on the moderating role of tourist destination.

This article uses crawler technology and regression analysis methods.

The researchers found the following: (1) The number of pictures uploaded with online comments, the number of merchant replies and the length of merchant replies have a significant positive effect on sales of tourism products, while the length of comments and the similarity of merchant replies negatively affect sales of tourism products. The emotional scores of the reviews do not significantly affect sales of tourism products. (2) Tourist destination moderates the relationship between user comments and sales of tourism products. The length of comments has a greater negative effect on sales of domestic tourism products, while the number of comments has a greater positive effect on sales of overseas tourism products. (3) Tourist destination moderates the relationship between merchant replies and sales of tourism products. Consumers who choose domestic tourism products pay more attention to the interactivity reflected by merchant replies (e.g. number and length of merchant replies), while consumers who choose overseas tourism products hope to receive replies that are more useful, such as reply similarity.

The research conclusions enrich the relevant research in the field of online review research and has practical significance for how companies increase sales of tourism products.

User-generated social media comments can be a useful source of information for understanding online corporate reputation. However, the manual classification of these comments is challenging due to their high volume and unstructured nature. The purpose of this paper is to develop a classification framework and machine learning model to overcome these limitations.

The authors create a multi-dimensional classification framework for the online corporate reputation that includes six main dimensions synthesized from prior literature: quality, reliability, responsibility, successfulness, pleasantness and innovativeness. To evaluate the classification framework’s performance on real data, the authors retrieve 19,991 social media comments about two Finnish banks and use a convolutional neural network (CNN) to classify automatically the comments based on manually annotated training data.

After parameter optimization, the neural network achieves an accuracy between 52.7 and 65.2 percent on real-world data, which is reasonable given the high number of classes. The findings also indicate that prior work has not captured all the facets of online corporate reputation.

For practical purposes, the authors provide a comprehensive classification framework for online corporate reputation, which companies and organizations operating in various domains can use. Moreover, the authors demonstrate that using a limited amount of training data can yield a satisfactory multiclass classifier when using CNN.

This is the first attempt at automatically classifying online corporate reputation using an online-specific classification framework.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of congruent and incongruent anonymous comments posted to an online health news article on personal risk perception. This association is examined through testing the moderating roles of perceived similarity and approval ratings, and the mediating roles of source credibility and content credibility.

Hypotheses regarding the impact of comments on personal risk perception were tested experimentally using a news article, comments and approval ratings about the ear picking behavior. Data were collected from 391 young Vietnamese respondents.

The influence of online comments (congruent vs incongruent) on personal risk perception was mediated by source credibility and content credibility. Further, data showed a direct effect of online comments on personal risk perception. Interestingly, the direct and indirect effects of online comments on personal risk perception were observed among participants who perceived that anonymous commenters were similar to them. Approval ratings had neither a main nor interaction effect with comments on the dependent variables.

The results indicate that marketers should consider online comments as a powerful form of social influence, which may alter consumers’ personal risk perception.

The present study adds to social marketing literature by showing how consumers’ online comments influence personal risk perception in the context of changing media ecosystem.

The purpose of the study was to assess the representation of different world views with respect to climate change in public opinion on the internet.

The authors conducted this world views analysis by means of a content analysis of publicly expressed opinions in the form of online lay reader comments to articles on climate change, published on Dutch newspaper web sites between August 2002 and December 2009. The comments were assigned to the world views of two typologies commonly used in ex ante assessment of climate policies. The classification of an online reader comment was based on world view specific keywords and positions on climate change.

From a set of 2,148 comments to 168 articles found on the web sites of 19 newspapers, 314 comments could be assigned to a particular world view. For both typologies, the distribution of comments over the different world views was highly uneven, with world views characterized as “climate sceptic” scoring more than 90 per cent of the assigned comments. The strong dominance of these “climate sceptic” world views was independent of year, newspaper, and scope of the article.

These findings are in stark contrast with the outcomes of public opinion surveys indicating that only a minority of the population has a preference for a “climate sceptic” world view. The most plausible explanation for this difference is that the contributors of online reader comments are not representative for the Dutch population at large. However, as internet-based opinions have a proven potential to strongly influence the opinion of the general public and politicians on climate change, the authors advise analysts to pay due attention to “climate sceptic” world views in ex ante assessment of the societal support for climate policies.

For a world views analysis, the study is unique both in its focus on internet public opinion and the data source used.

Today, online malicious comments are serious issues. They can cause psychological distress and suicide of victims. Although prior studies have focused on the role of anonymity as a major factor in making these comments, results of these studies have been inconsistent. On the other hand, the need for attention from others can provide an alternative explanation for such malicious comments. However, this perspective has been rarely studied. Therefore, the objective of this study was to investigate effects of anonymity and need for attention on posting malicious comments online and compare these two factors, resolving dark sides of online interaction.

This study obtained 327 questionnaires of Facebook users through a survey and analyzed the research model using partial least squares (PLS) regression.

Results of this study revealed that the need for attention affected malicious comments through partial mediation of neutralization. On the other hand, anonymity did not significantly affect malicious comments.

This study has the following academic implications. First, we empirically examined the critical influence of need for attention on making malicious comments online based on the impression management theory. Second, this study revealed that the influence of need for attention on making malicious comments was partially mediated by neutralization. Third, this study may offer an explanation for contradicting findings on the role of anonymity in the phenomenon of posting malicious comments online.

Practical implications of this study are as follows. First, SNS platforms can limit activities of persons who post malicious comments frequently. Second, this study suggests that a notice is needed to inform the seriousness and harmful consequences of malicious comments. Third, Facebook practitioners should be aware that low anonymity may not reduce malicious comments.

This study quantitatively examined the effect of need for attention on malicious comments based on the impression management theory. It provides a fact that individuals who want to attract attention from others would write malicious comments through neutralization.

The purpose of this paper is to outline how qualitative data can be used to gain insights into the experience of different cohorts of students including online and on-campus students.

Qualitative data from student surveys are used to analyse three years of data. The text analytics software Leximancer was used to analyse the qualitative student comments.

Comparing comments of on-campus and online students, the findings indicate that the students had different perceptions in regards to what they rated as best aspects of their course and what needed improvement.

The study is based on three years of qualitative comments collected in student surveys. The study is unique, given that previous studies have looked at qualitative comments in general rather than comparing the experience of online and on-campus students.

At times, a traditional minority group that opposes a change in the patriarchal structure is violent toward women who wish to adopt modern lifestyles. This study aims to examine online comments regarding a shooting at a café in an Arab-Bedouin city in Israel, where women were employed as servers. The event was framed in Israeli media as an act of backlash by young men, who call themselves “The Modesty Guard.”

In this qualitative study, the authors collected 916 online comments that were published on five main online news sites. A thematic and rhetorical analysis of online comments was conducted.

The findings uncovered five main themes: the expression of support for Bedouin women; ideas for dealing with the Modesty Guard; blaming Bedouin tradition for the shooting; comparison of the violent behavior to a parallel phenomenon among Charedim; and criticism of the lack of treatment by Israeli security forces. The responses reflected a supportive stance toward Arab-Bedouin women, who were open to progress. Conflict discourse, however, expressed alienation and increased social-national schism between the Jewish majority and Arab-Bedouin minority groups in Israel.

This study sheds light on the backlash phenomenon in Negev Bedouin society. Moreover, it exposes the lack of significant supportive actions and a lack of understanding of the deep processes unfolding in this traditional society.