Incivility and Gender Violence in the Digital Reaction towards a Feminist Post

Abstract

Although the civil conversation is fundamental for strengthening democracy, and despite the growth of the socio-digital networks as news sources, the citizen’s intervention in digital pages of news organizations hasn’t been fully studied yet in Latin-America. For that, from a theoretical point of view of the online political participation, this article analyzes the digital behavior of the online communities from sociodigital networks towards news published by a regional media company from its official Facebook page. For that, a combination of quantitative and qualitative methodologies was used in different stages in order to reveal and analyze the reactions ad comments shared publicly about a post originated from Women’s Day. The results obtained make evident that negative opinions and criticisms are always preponderant but, furthermore, they grow on time. Likewise, while the participations are predominantly from women initially, then profiles identified as male end up dominating the conversation. With this, comments start becoming uncivil and end up becoming examples of gender violence and hate messages. In fact, the public identification of the profiles doesn’t seem to mitigate the level pf aggression of these interventions. The research concluded that this debate needs deeper studies on the regulation of messages inviting to violence to avoid echo chambers and silence spirals that might potentiate de social polarization.