“All Is Fair in… Meme!” How Heterosexual Users Perceive and React to Memes, News, and Posts Discriminating against Sexual Minorities

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper describes a study that analyzes the online behavior and perception by heterosexual users towards offensive/discriminatory contents agains sexual minorites.

The study is quite exploratory, but reports some interesting findings nonetheless, among which the correlation between heterogeneity of online network and perception of offensiveness, or the higher difficulty by users in identifying offensive content in memes, compared to news and posts, due to their greater ambiguity and their humorous nature.

Overall, the paper is clear, easy to follow and well structured. My major concern regards the results reported in table 1, as it is not clear what columns 1 to 14 refer to. I thus recommend the authors to better clarify the table content along with the measures reported.

Author Response

We want to thank you and the other reviewer for the feedbacks on our manuscript. We have addressed every comment and suggestion made, and we adjusted the manuscript accordingly. Please, find below the changes we made in italic.

The paper describes a study that analyzes the online behavior and perception by heterosexual users towards offensive/discriminatory contents agains sexual minorites.

The study is quite exploratory, but reports some interesting findings nonetheless, among which the correlation between heterogeneity of online network and perception of offensiveness, or the higher difficulty by users in identifying offensive content in memes, compared to news and posts, due to their greater ambiguity and their humorous nature.

We thank the reviewer for the positive evaluation.

Overall, the paper is clear, easy to follow and well structured. My major concern regards the results reported in table 1, as it is not clear what columns 1 to 14 refer to. I thus recommend the authors to better clarify the table content along with the measures reported.

We thank the reviewer for the suggestion. We changed the table formatting in order to make it clearer. In addition, we also specified in the tables notes the inclusion of the variables ranges.

Reviewer 2 Report

Review of: "All is fair in... meme!". How heterosexual users perceive and react to memes, news, and posts discriminating against sexual minorities

Thank you for the opportunity to review the above-titled manuscript. The study is original and makes a valuable contribution to existing studies. The data collection process, analysis and discussion are appropriate too. The findings emanate directly from the data and are properly aligned with the aim of the study.

In the literature review, the author may consider the use of 'few authors' or 'few studies' because, to the best of my knowledge, there are already many significant studies in this area of study.

There are a few cases of infelicities which can be straightened through proper editing. An example is:

 It increasingly spreads through discriminatory contents that mixes text and images

Author Response

We want to thank you and the other reviewer for the feedbacks on our manuscript. We have addressed every comment and suggestion made, and we adjusted the manuscript accordingly. Please, find below the changes we made in italic.

Review of: "All is fair in... meme!". How heterosexual users perceive and react to memes, news, and posts discriminating against sexual minorities

Thank you for the opportunity to review the above-titled manuscript. The study is original and makes a valuable contribution to existing studies. The data collection process, analysis and discussion are appropriate too. The findings emanate directly from the data and are properly aligned with the aim of the study.

We thank the reviewer for the positive comments on our study.

In the literature review, the author may consider the use of 'few authors' or 'few studies' because, to the best of my knowledge, there are already many significant studies in this area of study.

We thank the reviewer for the suggestion, we changed the introduction of the manuscript accordingly, eliminating “few studies/authors”.

There are a few cases of infelicities which can be straightened through proper editing. An example is:

 It increasingly spreads through discriminatory contents that mixes text and images

We are sorry for these oversights, we carefully double-checked the text and corrected any spelling errors and typos.