Engaging to Oppose: Cross-Cutting Patterns in Hostile News Commentary

Prior work shows that passive news engagement, such as selection and consumption, exhibits strong news selectivity. Far less attention has been given to more active forms of news engagement, however. News commentary, an active form of engagement, may reflect cross-cutting engagement rather than pro-attitudinal selectivity, given its expressive and often confrontational nature. Using ten years of commenting data from South Korea’s largest news aggregator—amounting to over 250 million comments posted by approximately six million users—and a deep-learning content analysis to classify political attitudes and hostility, we examine whether hostile commentary is indeed characterized by cross-cutting patterns across both content and source levels. We specifically analyze whether users comment on counter-attitudinal news stories and whether hostile commenters are structurally confined within fragmented outlet clusters in co-engagement media networks. Findings show that hostile commenters are more likely to cross boundaries by targeting opposing news stories and exhibit weaker echo chamber structures, reflecting cross-cutting engagement beyond their clusters. This pattern is especially pronounced in political and societal domains. In today’s media environment, hostility and opposition may ironically disrupt, rather than reinforce, echo chambers.