In an increasingly polarised world, online interactions often denigrate into trolling and hate speak — and do so quickly. German news media organisation Der Spiegel wanted to create a healthier way to provide online interaction, and that led to creating its own product, Spiegel Debatte, which it launched in December 2023.

During this week’s Webinar, How to foster civil online debate in a divided world, INMA members heard from Dr. Laura Badura, product manager at Der Spiegel, about how the company set out to allow free speech and encourage engagement whilst warding off negative and hateful comments.

“I assume that you can relate when I say that online hate is part of everyday life,” Badura said, citing a recent German study that found 89% of all users believe online hate has increased. Der Spiegel wanted to change the tone, but Badura acknowledged “building a constructive onsite community in the context of reporting on crises, wars, and pandemics is not that easy.”

Gone were the days when the Speigel communities featured civil exchanges, but at the same time, the community platform was extremely popular, with up to 1.7 million comments a month. At the time, all articles were open for comments, which allowed more reader feedback and interaction, but also made moderating the comments time-consuming and labor intensive.

“That left us with two options: close down the onsite community for good or burn everything down and rebuild,” she said.

The company decided to burn it down and start over, creating an online debate space that welcomed civil exchanges of information and opinions.

Creating a place that welcomed civil discourse isn’t just good for the users, Badura said, as studies show that negative comments affect the overall impression of articles and the site. By creating a new space providing constructive commenting, Der Spiegel could improve the experience for users whilst elevating the opinion of the publication.  

Finding out what users want

The first thing the company did was get feedback from users to find out what kind of community appealed to them.

“We found that our users would like to participate, but only 12% want to participate actively by asking questions at one of our events, for example, or by commenting,” she said. “And 65% preferred to be informed passively by listening to events or reading comments.”

Qualitative interviews discovered the site had two groups of commenters: One group uses the comments section as a way to be seen by the editorial team or to get in touch with our journalists, while the other group is looking for discussions with other users.

An overriding desire of users was to prevent hate speech and make the discussions more constructive, which also makes participation more enjoyable. Armed with that information, Der Spiegel went to work on developing the new product that would check the appropriate boxes.

That process took about a year and a half, and Badura said it began with looking at all the problems of the existing comments forum and creating suitable solutions. While the squad working on the project had a few core members, including Badura, individual colleagues from other departments (research, marketing, technical departments, legal, etc.) were brought in during specific phases as needed.

“Also essential to our product journey were UX tests in order to constantly compare our vision with the desires of our users,” she said. “With their help, we were able to focus on what really makes an MVP.”

Unveiling a new space

Upon its debut, Spiegel Debatte immediately received a warm reception.

“Within the first seven hours, 10,000 users registered to the tool. These are not new users, but users that were curious enough to create a new profile within the debate space,” Badura said. Today, it has more than 264,000 registered users and has created more than 530 debates. The articles no longer have comments section, but users can discuss them on Spiegel Debatte.

“As a result, comments on the U.S. election, for example, are no longer isolated from each other by being linked to the hundreds of different articles we have on the topic on the site,” Badura explained. “Rather, they are collected here in just a handful of debates.”

Users can click on one of the debates and answer a debate question with a yes or a no at the top of the page; that answer is saved and displayed in the section for submitting comments. Users can change their answers or even write comments for both sides. And, if they think there are questions missing that should be asked, they can submit those as well.

So far, 2.1 million votes have been cast by subscribers and the rate of comments accepted during the moderation process has increased.

“We are currently at an 85 to 90% acceptance rate in the moderation, and we have also achieved our goal of reducing the volume of comments,” Badura said, noting Der Spiegel used to receive 1.7 million comments per month and now averages 30,000 comments monthly.

One surprising discovery since the platform’s launch is most robust discussions don’t involve topics where users are divided in their opinions but rather occur when sentiment is strongly in favor of — or opposed to — a singular issue.

Community content is also getting its due on the platform; Badura said Spiegel Debatte is part of the editorial print strategy and encourages online discussion of stories in the print edition.

She shared an example of a magazine cover story about protests against Germany’s far right party. A debate question online referred to the cover story, and one of the arguments from the online debate was printed in the magazine one week later.

The magazine publishes a two-page spread each week featuring readers’ responses to the previous week’s publication, and since the cover story was discussed online, Badura said the magazine included the online responses:

“We supplemented the Letters section with comments from the onsite discussion, and in turn, the page refers back to the online debate using a QR code,” she said. “This way, we have achieved a nice interaction between the online and offline discussion.”

Lessons learned

Developing Spiegel Debatte has been a rich learning experience, not only in developing a new product but also learning more about its online community, Badura said.

“I agree with our users when I say we still need good online communities and we need them on respected news media outlets where people get high-quality information and feel the urge to discuss different views on current events,” she said. However, it “takes a village” to create and maintain those online communities.

Through this process, Der Spiegel was reminded of the importance of listening to users, who provided “important guidance throughout the entire process.”

And finally, she said, this project taught the value of burning it down and starting over:

“We learned how important a fresh start can be. The complete rebuild was a big step for us, but we are extremely happy with the results and with the feedback we have received from our users — in addition to the higher overall comment quality.”

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