Opposites react

Since 2005, the Guardian newspaper online site has generated over 70 million comments, from over 100 million unique users of the site per month. A study recently published by the paper highlights the journalists whose work attracts the most abusive comments.

From the ten journalists identified, eight were women, and two were black males – despite the majority of the Guardian’s regular column writers being white males. Perhaps a coincidence, but nonetheless mirroring a worrying trend of behaviour in the digital age, whereby people are more confident to vent criticism from behind a keyboard.

Abusive comments are a growing pressure for journalists whose work is published digitally, particularly given the high presence of national newspapers on social media platforms.

What constitutes the conditions for negative responses to posts and articles is thus of increasing interest to newspaper and publishers alike. One business to take heed is London-based artificial intelligence company Artios. Its new report highlights public responses to social media posts, in a condition whereby all contextual identity has been removed.

Using criteria such as trustworthiness, approachability, and friendliness, Artios asked 1000 adults to rate social media content from popular Instagram, Twitter and Facebook sites, without revealing the identity of any authors.

The results found that responses to posts on subjects ranging from politics, to deaths of famous individuals, even to branding, did not align with usual trends.

In a press release, Andreas Voniatis, data science lead at Artios, says, "Our reactions to social media content can very easily be clouded by an author's appearance, ethnicity, gender or how they self-identify. We often read a person's biography before finalising our reaction to their post.”

"Reactions can even be coloured by context, such as the channel on which content is consumed or by news stories that may be trending at the time. We wanted to see what happened when people were unable to access their existing biases.”

A particularly striking finding is the disparity in responses to male or female commentators. Perhaps surprisingly, Artios’ study found that men are 5% more likely to respond positively to articles written by females – women are similarly 2% more likely to respond positively to articles written by men.

On the other hand, women were also found to be 11% more likely to find posts written by men patronising. Similarly, 50% less men than women cited a post about women in technology as ‘trustworthy’. These two findings are more in-keeping with the general consensus around online commenters which, as demonstrated by the Guardian, are often driven by the gender or ethnic background of the commentator.

For companies owning or relying on major brands, these findings are important in devising social media strategies. This is particularly true for platforms such as Twitter, which have the potential to generate hundreds of views in a matter of minutes.

For example, Artios found that women were 11% more likely than men to respond positively to content written by brands. Recent trend for brands to specifically address women, particularly following on from widespread social media campaigns such as #LikeAGirl and #ThisGirlCan, may account for this finding.

Similarly, campaigns by brands such as Lynx toiletries have increasingly focused on sensitivity and elegance in contemporary depictions of masculinity. Such campaigns have the potential to be divisive to a male audience, and can cause more explicit reaction.

Artios cite a tweet posted by British Gas, which celebrates females in STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) subjects, as generating the largest difference in response between genders during its study. The tweet reads, “Inspired by #GirlsinSTEM? Meet 5 women fighting against engineering gender stereotypes.”

16% of women, compared to just 8% of men, rated this as trustworthy – perhaps language choice has as much of a divisive effect on genders as the brand’s visual identity.

Voniatis continues, "One of the most interesting things was just how well brand posts performed overall. Protein World, who experienced a lot of negative responses last year during their beach body ready campaign, received a positive response from 58% of people for a post about weight loss goals. John Lewis's post talking about back to work day was rated positively by 45% of people."

There has been a recent, hugely influential shift in the use of social media, which has been particularly formative for brands and their identity. Gender disparity in opinion is perhaps inevitable; yet reasons behind such differing responses to articles may hold the key to continued brand innovation and development.

The full results of the study can be viewed here.