Engaging to Oppose: Cross-Cutting Patterns in Hostile News Commentary

Prior work suggests that passive news engagement, such as selection and consumption, exhibits strong selectivity. Far less attention has been given to more active forms of news engagement, however, such as commenting on news stories. There are reasons to expect that comments—particularly given the frequency of hostility—reflect cross-cutting engagement rather than pro-attitudinal selectivity. Using ten years of commenting data from South Korea’s largest news aggregator, we examine whether hostile commentary is dominated by selective or cross-cutting patterns. We consider both content-level and source-level engagement, focusing on whether users comment on counter-attitudinal news stories and whether hostile users are structurally confined within fragmented outlet clusters. Findings suggest that hostile users are more likely to cross boundaries, targeting opposing news stories. They also exhibit weaker echo chamber structures, reflecting cross-cutting engagement beyond their clusters. This pattern is especially pronounced in political and societal domains. In today’s media environment, hostility and opposition may ironically not reinforce echo chambers—they may disrupt them.