Transferring control from the backend to the frontend: A comparison of the discourse architectures of comment sections on news websites across the post-Soviet world

Abstract

This study compares how comment sections (CSs) were implemented, as of summer 2016, on the 179 leading national news websites across the 15 post-Soviet countries. In order to pursue this aim, a novel coding scheme is developed that facilitates assessment of the degree to which the discourse architectures of CSs transfer control over the content published from the backend to the frontend of a website. Accordingly, each CS is assigned a value on a ‘control transfer index’ (CTI). The study identifies the level of press freedom/democracy of a country as the only significant predictor for whether, and how openly, CSs were implemented. The popularity of CSs and their CTIs decreased with decreasing levels of press freedom/democracy. However, even in the most closed regimes, CSs were still a relatively commonly observed phenomenon. We interpret this latter finding by drawing on theories of citizen participation under authoritarian rule.