Due to the participatory nature of Web 2.0, polite communication on social media and news sites can stand side by side with uncivil comments. Research on online incivility has been conducted with users reading in their mother tongues (L1), while the potential effects of incivility in a second language (L2) have been largely under-explored. This paper analyzes the effects of uncivil comments written in an L2 on attitudes around emerging technologies. Accordingly, study 1 replicates and extends a previous experiment on the effects of incivility to online news on risk perceptions of nanotechnology (Anderson et al., 2014), by adding an ‘L2 condition’ (uncivil comments written in an L2). Then, study 2 analyzes the effect of incivility on four fictitious Twitter debates around different scientific issues, varying language (L1 or L2), and civility. Results from both studies show that participants are more likely to endorse claims written in a civil rather than uncivil manner, but only in the L1. The results contribute to understanding how online communication is affected by reading in an L2.

由于Web 2.0的参与性，社交媒体和新闻站点上的礼貌交流可以与不文明的评论并存。用户使用母语（L1）进行阅读时，已经进行了在线不活跃性的研究，而第二语言（L2）引起的不活跃性的潜在影响在很大程度上尚未得到充分研究。本文分析了L2中不文明的评论对新兴技术态度的影响。因此，研究1通过添加“ L2条件”（以L2撰写的非民事评论），复制并扩展了先前的关于不活跃性对在线新闻对纳米技术风险感知的影响的实验（Anderson等，2014）。然后，研究2分析了不文明行为对围绕不同科学问题，不同语言（L1或L2）和文明的四个虚拟Twitter辩论的影响。两项研究的结果均表明，参与者更有可能认可以民事而非非民事方式撰写的声明，但仅以L1表示。结果有助于理解通过阅读L2会如何影响在线交流。