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Changing Others' Beliefs Online: Online Comments' Persuasiveness

Published: 19 July 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Achieving social welfare and success is heavily reliant on our ability to persuade and influence others, yet this capacity is known to be one of the most challenging social skills to develop and possess. With social networking websites becoming a crucial platform for routine social activities, gaining insight into the strategies and mechanisms behind online persuasion is of great interest and value to a variety of disciplines. Hence, in this study, we aim to study written comments in online deliberations and understand what makes people change their beliefs. We explore different dimensions of the language, the order of the comments, as well as the attributes of the participating users and their relation to the persuasion process. In addition, we investigate the factors that persuaded users (the ones who have already changed their beliefs) perceived to be the reasons that led to their opinion change. We link our findings to earlier research on persuasion and belief change in traditional forms, hoping to uncover when and how they apply to online persuasion.

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    SMSociety '19: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Social Media and Society
    July 2019
    247 pages
    ISBN:9781450366519
    DOI:10.1145/3328529
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 19 July 2019

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    Author Tags

    1. Online persuasion
    2. Reddit
    3. language use analysis

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    Cited By

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    • (2024)[citation needed]: An Examination of Types and Purpose of Evidence Provided in Three Online Discussions on RedditProceedings of the 2024 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval10.1145/3627508.3638321(219-230)Online publication date: 10-Mar-2024
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    • (2022)Aggressive behaviour of anti-vaxxers and their toxic replies in English and JapaneseHumanities and Social Sciences Communications10.1057/s41599-022-01245-x9:1Online publication date: 5-Jul-2022
    • (2022)How Does the Thread Level of a Comment Affect its Perceived Persuasiveness? A Reddit StudyIntelligent Computing10.1007/978-3-031-10464-0_55(800-813)Online publication date: 7-Jul-2022
    • (2022)Language Use and Susceptibility in Online ConversationIntelligent Computing10.1007/978-3-031-10464-0_54(787-799)Online publication date: 7-Jul-2022
    • (2022)Persuasion in Audio‐based Social Media: A Clubhouse Interview StudyProceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology10.1002/pra2.74459:1(840-842)Online publication date: 14-Oct-2022
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