Out-group animosity drives engagement on social media

Abstract

There has been growing concern about the role social media plays in political polarization. We investigated whether out-group animosity was particularly successful at generating engagement on two of the largest social media platforms: Facebook and Twitter. Analyzing posts from news media accounts and US congressional members (n = 2,730,215), we found that posts about the political out-group were shared or retweeted about twice as often as posts about the in-group. Each individual term referring to the political out-group increased the odds of a social media post being shared by 67%. Out-group language consistently emerged as the strongest predictor of shares and retweets: the average effect size of out-group language was about 4.8 times as strong as that of negative affect language and about 6.7 times as strong as that of moral-emotional language—both established predictors of social media engagement. Language about the out-group was a very strong predictor of “angry” reactions (the most popular reactions across all datasets), and language about the in-group was a strong predictor of “love” reactions, reflecting in-group favoritism and out-group derogation. This out-group effect was not moderated by political orientation or social media platform, but stronger effects were found among political leaders than among news media accounts. In sum, out-group language is the strongest predictor of social media engagement across all relevant predictors measured, suggesting that social media may be creating perverse incentives for content expressing out-group animosity.

Stakes of Knowing the Truth: A Motivational Perspective on the Popularity of a Controversial Scientific Theory

“…It becomes less about asserting that the proposition is true than conveying an attitude. This use of information as a mean to manage relations with one's ingroup is illustrated by recent works showing that anti-outgroup language is a strong predictor of social engagement on social media (Rathje et al, 2021), and that individuals who report hating their political opponents are the most likely to share political fake news (Osmundsen et al, 2021). This perspective implies that a major strength of questionable information and theories is the social success they enjoy, due to people's propensity to share them for other reasons than genuine belief in their accuracy.…”

Social reference cues can reduce misinformation sharing behaviour on social media

“…Social identity processes describe those processes related to the degree to which a person identifies with a particular social group (in-group identification) and favors this in-group over other out-groups (inter-group bias). Sharing content on social media on particular topics can serve the function of increasing identification with a particular group SOCIAL CUES REDUCE MISINFORMATION SHARING 6 and increase the difference to e.g., political out-groups (Rathje, Bavel, & van der Linden, 2021). This suggests that targeting the social processes underlying sharing behavior could be an important additional building block to design interventions and environments that effectively reduce the sharing of misinformation on social media and empower its users.…”

Digital culture

“…Recent studies have highlighted that successful politically-related content on Twitter is often correlated with out-group animosity or derogation (Osmundsen et al, 2021;Rathje et al, 2021).…”