Via a content analysis of 4,800 comments from online commenting forums of top news sites, this research examines the overall quality of the comments. Expanding the scope of previous research in this area and guided by the theory of deliberative democracy, the normative conditions for quality discourse were measured with six parameters: civility, reciprocity, reflexivity, rationality, diversity, and relevance. In measuring the quality of the comments, two conditions were the identity of the commenter.
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