Racist comments at online news sites: a methodological dilemma for discourse analysis

In 2004, awash with the hope for a public sphere reinvigorated by the popular internet, the online arms of many U.S. newspapers opened their websites for comments. Now, nine years into this experiment, many newspapers have abandoned the practice of allowing comments. Online news sites have adopted a variety of strategies to deal with offensive comments, including turning “comments off,” not archiving comments, and adopting aggressive comment moderation policies. These strategies present researchers who wish to understand how racism operates in the new public sphere of mainstream news sites with a set of methodological dilemmas. In this article we (1) lay out the methodological pitfalls for the systematic investigation of the prevalent pattern of racism in online comments in the public sphere and (2) suggest steps by which scholars may deal with these methodological intricacies. We conclude by pointing to the broader implications of online content moderation.