UC Davis

Reports of sexual assault have been found to elicit online discourse incivility. The present study employs a computerized coding tool to examine linguistic characteristics of news media that are likely to influence discourse incivility—specifically, negative emotion, disagreement, and discussion about power relations. Additionally, machine learning was harnessed to measure the levels of comment toxicity, insult, profanity, threat, and identity attack in Reddit and Twitterposts sharing news reports of sexual assault. Findings reveal that linguistic features of news articles interact with platform community norms to predict rape culture as expressed within online responses to reports of sexual assault.