News comment sections and online echo chambers: The ideological alignment between partisan news stories and their user comments

Abstract

This study explored the presence of digital echo chambers in the realm of partisan media's news comment sections in South Korea. We analyzed the political slant of 152 K user comments written by 76 K unique contributors on NAVER, the country's most popular news aggregator. We found that the political slant of the average user comments to be in alignment with the political leaning of the conservative news outlets; however, this was not true of the progressive media. A considerable number of comment contributors made a crossover from like-minded to cross-cutting partisan media and argued with their political opponents. The majority of these crossover commenters were "headstrong ideologues," followed by "flip-floppers" and "opponents." The implications of the present study are discussed in light of the potential for the news comment sections to be the digital cafes of Public Sphere 2.0 rather than echo chambers.