"Comment the world ruling minorities"... News comment blitz analysis

<Anchor>

We analyzed the comments in detail to find the answer to this question, whether it can be said that the comments left by many people on the portal site represent public opinion, and whether they well represent the various voices of our society.

SBS <Team Actually> and Data Journalism <Morning Stance> searched for 190 million comments in Naver and Daum's Most Viewed Articles.

Comment Analysis Continuous reporting, today (29th), we will look at who comments in the first order.

First is Park Won-kyung.

<Reporter> From

the beginning of this year to September, there were 26.5 million and 23 million comments on Naver and Daum's Most Viewed Articles, respectively.

More than 1 million people have commented at least once.

Due to a lot of chatter, comments on articles are sometimes introduced as public opinion.

[Heo Jong-sik/ Democratic Party member (5th of last month): Public sentiment is well documented in the Blue House and media comments.

Let's take a look.]

[Dae-chul Park/Representative of the People's Strength (March 27 last year): These are the comments now.

This is the reaction of the people.]

How many and different opinions do portal news comments actually reflect?

<Team in fact> collected and analyzed Naver and Daum's'Most Viewed Articles' and comments from August 2017 to September of this year, together with SBS Data Journalism Team's <Stop Down> and big data specialists.

About 208,000 articles on Naver, 57,000 articles on the next article, and 190 million comments posted here are the targets.

First of all, the amount of comments.

Naver posted an average of 537 comments per article this year, and Daum had more than three times that.

And the difference is getting bigger and bigger.

Naver was more likely to write comments.

From January to September this year, Naver's commenting IDs are 1.36 million, and the following are about 1.33 million.

However, it is known that Naver News users are 8 times as many as Daum, and that Naver has almost 4 times as many articles to be analyzed, so Daum News users are more active in writing comments.

Divided the total number of comments by the number of authors.

It means that one person averages around 20 per year, is that really?

'2,617' In the data we analyzed, the number of comments made in the 9 months of this year is the number of people who received the most comments, which is 10 per day.

We selected the top 10% in the order of many comments, but comments made by about 140,000 people, the top 10% in Naver, accounted for 73% of the total.

Then, again, the top 10%, 100,000 people wrote 75%.

[Won-Jae Lee / Professor at KAIST Graduate School of Culture and Technology: Google and Apple dominate the world of comments to the extent that Google and Apple dominate the world's economy.

Our society should be wary of this focus.]

(Video coverage: Lee Byeong-ju, video editing: Kim Jong-tae, analysis: Dive, CG: Hong Seong-yong·Jung Si-won, sponsor: Korean Press Association, SNU Fact Check Center)

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<Anchor>

Let me ask a few questions to reporter Park Won-kyung of <The fact is the team> who prepared this content.

190 million comments, quite a lot of comments, how did you specifically analyze this?

[Park Won-kyung/Reporter: First of all, the target period for analysis is about 3 years from August 2017 to last September. There is a section called the most viewed article on both Naver and Daum portals, and there are about 190 million comments on that article. Done.

With this data, I analyzed the characteristics of the author with a big data company for about a month, and whether the writing patterns by issue and period were slightly different.]

[Park Won-kyung/Reporter: Yes, it is.

People who comment a lot now are called heavy commenters, and the top 10% of comments with a lot of comments accounted for more than 70% of all comments.

There are about 100,000 of these people, only about 0.3% of the population in their teens or older.

In other words, the opinions of a few are overrepresented in the online space.]

[Park Won-kyung/Reporter: That's right.

And although this is a small number of people who write a lot of comments, these people respond quickly to issues and actively express their likes and dislikes.

So it's hard to completely ignore the influence of these people.

In the next article, I analyzed what people commented on so-called controversial issues such as real estate or prosecution reform.]  

▶ Controversial articles and comment wars, who is all?