# Article and Comment Frames Shape the Quality of Online Comments

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.27889 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27889/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [DeBERTaV3: Improving DeBERTa using ELECTRA-Style Pre-Training with Gradient-Disentangled Embedding Sharing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09543/) (2021)
- [Smarter, Better, Faster, Longer: A Modern Bidirectional Encoder for Fast, Memory Efficient, and Long Context Finetuning and Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13663/) (2024)
- [Large Scale Crowdsourcing and Characterization of Twitter Abusive Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.00393/) (2018)
- [Framing and Agenda-setting in Russian News: a Computational Analysis of Intricate Political Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09386/) (2018)
- [Six Attributes of Unhealthy Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07410/) (2020)
- [Analyzing Toxicity in Deep Conversations: A Reddit Case Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07879/) (2024)
- [Retain or Reframe? A Computational Framework for the Analysis of Framing in News Articles and Reader Comments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04612/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Framing theory posits that how information is presented shapes audience responses, but computational work has largely ignored audience reactions. While recent work showed that article framing systematically shapes the content of reader responses, this paper asks: does framing also affect response quality? Analyzing 1M comments across 2.7K news articles, we operationalize quality as comment health. We find that article frames significantly predict comment health while controlling for topic, and that comments that adopt the article frame are healthier than those that depart from it. Further, unhealthy top-level comments tend to generate more unhealthy responses, independent of the frame being used in the comment. Our results establish a link between framing theory and discourse quality, laying the groundwork for downstream applications. We illustrate this potential with a pro-active frame-aware LLM- based system to mitigate unhealthy discourse.
