포털 정치 뉴스 댓글의 이념적 편향성 인식과 규제 태도: 적대적 댓글 지각(Hostile Comment Perception) 효과를 중심으로 = The Effects of Hostile Comment Perception on Attitudes Toward Comment Regulation: The Case of Portal Political News in South Korea

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This study examines how political ideology shapes perceptions of bias in portal news comments and how such perceptions influence support for comment regulation in South Korea's portal-centered media environment. In a system where most citizens access news through dominant portal sites rather than individual news outlets, user comments function as salient quasi-public opinion cues that shape readers' inferences about public sentiment. Drawing on the hostile media perception framework, which holds that partisans tend to interpret identical media content as biased against their own position, this study extends the theory beyond journalistic content to user-generated discourse surrounding the news. We introduce the concept of “hostile comment perception” to capture this extension and empirically test whether it operates in the structurally distinct context of portal comment spaces, where user-generated content is presented without editorial gatekeeping yet displayed alongside news articles and ranked by aggregated user endorsement. Using survey data from 1,150 South Korean adults collected immediately prior to the 2024 National Assembly election, we analyze perceptions of ideological bias in political and government-related news comments on Naver, the country’s dominant portal site. The findings show that respondents tended to perceive these comments as ideologically biased in a direction opposing their own political orientation, providing empirical evidence that hostile media perceptions extend to user-generated comment environments. Furthermore, individuals who perceived a greater discrepancy between their own ideological position and the perceived ideological leaning of portal comments exhibited stronger support for regulatory measures, including legal punishment for misinformation in comments and the implementation of a real-name system. However, hostile comment perception was not significantly associated with support for the complete abolition of comment sections, suggesting that users seek to correct perceived distortions in the comment space rather than eliminate the space itself. Perceived usefulness of comments did not significantly moderate the relationship between perceived bias and regulatory support; the influence of hostile comment perception on regulatory attitudes did not differ between those who viewed comments as useful and those who did not. These findings demonstrate that hostile media perceptions encompass not only journalistic content but also the surrounding user-generated discourse, manifesting as hostile perceptions of comment environments even when the comments are produced outside editorial control. The findings also indicate that support for comment regulation appears to be shaped more by individuals' ideological orientations than by neutral evaluations of bias within the comment space. Overall, this study offers important implications for ongoing normative and policy discussions surrounding the governance of online news comment spaces in South Korea.