Abstract
With social media now being ubiquitously used by citizens and political actors, concerns over the incivility of interactions on these platforms have grown. While research has already started to investigate some of the factors that lead users to leave incivil comments on political social media posts, we are lacking a comprehensive understanding of the influence of platform, post, and person characteristics. Using automated text analysis methods on a large body of U.S. Congress Members' social media posts (n = 253,884) and the associated user comments (n = 49,508,863), we investigate how different social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter), characteristics of the original post (e.g., incivility, reach), and personal characteristics of the politicians (e.g., gender, ethnicity) affect the occurrence of incivil user comments. Our results show that ~23% of all comments can be classified as incivil but that there are important temporal and contextual dynamics. Having incivil comments on one's social media page seems more likely on Twitter than on Facebook and more likely when politicians use incivil language themselves, while the influence of personal characteristics is less clear-cut. Our findings add to the literature on political incivility by providing important insights regarding the dynamics of uncivil discourse, thus helping platforms, political actors, and educators to address associated problems.
Highlights
Social media have become an important part of political communication: Especially during election campaigns, and during more routine political times, politicians have widely adopted social media for broadcasting information, interacting with relevant publics, or mobilizing voters (Larsson and Kalsnes, 2014; Stier et al, 2018)
Recent research suggests that the politicians themselves will be the main target of incivil comments to their social media posts (Rossini, 2021), our research deliberately focuses on various utterances of incivility, as reflected in the broad definition offered above
Using a fine-tuned BERT classifier, we analyzed Facebook and Twitter posts made by Members of the 117th U.S Congress between July 1, 2020 and June 30, 2021 (n = 253,884), as well as the comments left under these posts (n = 49,508,863) regarding their incivility
Summary
Social media have become an important part of political communication: Especially during election campaigns, and during more routine political times, politicians have widely adopted social media for broadcasting information, interacting with relevant publics, or mobilizing voters (Larsson and Kalsnes, 2014; Stier et al, 2018). Citizens routinely use various social media platforms to follow political information and actors (Marquart et al, 2020; Newman et al, 2021) This increased engagement is accompanied by concerns over the incivility of interactions on social media platforms, which we broadly define here as “features of discussion that convey an unnecessarily disrespectful tone toward the discussion forum, its participants, or its topics” Knowing what triggers incivility in political social media discussions is crucial to understand the dynamics of uncivil discourse and develop strategies for dealing with potential negative effects
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