Does Google count comments as a quality factor?

[My_Media]

Hi Guys,
I have great quality pages on my site but worried that my users low quality comments ruin the over all quality of the page.
I have many articles that have many hundreds of comments. Will the low quality comments lower the quality score?

Thanks,

[tedster]

I prefer marking up individual comments because that helps people link directly to a single comment - and that can be good for social media. So if you can do it without breaking the bank on resources spent, it is a good idea.