Profiling Insurrection: Characterizing Collective Action Using Mobile Device Data

Dijcke, David Van; Wright, Austin L.

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3776854

Cited by 11 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 89 publications

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“…For instance, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has expressed concern about the popularity of "dunking" (i.e., mocking or denigrating one's enemies) on the platform (2). These concerns have become particularly relevant as social media rhetoric appears to have incited real-world violence, such as the recent storming of the US Capital (3). We sought to investigate whether out-group animosity was associated with increased virality on two of the largest social media platforms: Facebook and Twitter.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Out-group animosity drives engagement on social media

Rathje

Bavel

Linden

2021

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

326

188

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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.

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mentioning

confidence: 99%

Out-group animosity drives engagement on social media

Rathje

Bavel

Linden

2021

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

326

188

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“…Based on nationally representative survey data, they found that alt-right supporters were more likely than both non-alt-right Trump voters and non-Trump voters to be higher in authoritarianism, biased against minority groups, supportive of white identitarian collective action, and distrustful of mainstream media. Using a mixture of mobile location data, public social media metadata, and precinct-level election data from the 2016 presidential election, Van Dijcke and Wright (2021) found that increased political isolation, proximity to local chapters of extremist groups (e.g. the Proud Boys), and engagement with alternative social media sites like Parler were associated with active participation in the 6th January insurrection.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Partisan selective exposure and politically polarized attitudes toward disruptive protest

Lorenzano¹,

Moon

Borah

2023

Communication and the Public

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While many Americans support the right to protest, increased animus has recently been directed at protesters themselves, often along partisan ideological lines and in partisan media content. However, there is a lack of research on attitudes toward treatment of protesters in the context of political violence and selective exposure to likeminded partisan sources of information. This study finds that a significant, positive relationship exists between self-identified Republicans and thinking that disruptive protesters deserve to be “roughed up,” while identifying as a Democrat produced a negative relationship in the same circumstance. Likewise, consumption of conservative partisan media was found to have a positive relationship with the idea of “roughing up” disruptive protesters, while liberal partisan media was found to have a negative relationship. However, selective exposure to attitude-affirming media only had a significant impact among self-identified Democrats, in the sense that Democrats’ selective exposure to left-leaning media was associated with less support for “roughing up” disruptive protesters.

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“…However, other research argues that using social media has little effect on users’ opinions and behavior (e.g., Foos et al 2020; Schumann et al 2021; Theocharis and Lowe 2016), and that individuals’ existing attitudes drive their use of social media (Heiss and Matthes 2019; Nordbrandt 2021). Moreover, much of the scholarship attributing offline mobilization to social media has limited scope, focusing on places with authoritarian regimes (e.g., Enikolopov, Makarin, and Petrova 2020; Steinert-Threlkeld 2017; Weidmann and Rød 2019) or large but rare protests, such as the 2015 Charlie Hebdo protests (Larson et al 2019) and the 2021 U.S. Capitol riot (Van Dijcke and Wright 2021).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“Born for a Storm”: Hard-Right Social Media and Civil Unrest

et al. 2023

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Does activity on hard-right social media lead to hard-right civil unrest? If so, why? We created a spatial panel dataset comprising hard-right social media use and incidents of unrest across the United States from January 2020 through January 2021. Using spatial regression analyses with core-based statistical area (CBSA) and month fixed effects, we find that greater CBSA-level hard-right social media activity in a given month is associated with an increase in subsequent unrest. The results of robustness checks, placebo tests, alternative analytical approaches, and sensitivity analyses support this finding. To examine why hard-right social media activity predicts unrest, we draw on an original dataset of users’ shared content and status in the online community. Analyses of these data suggest that hard-right social media shift users’ perceptions of norms, increasing the likelihood they will participate in contentious events they once considered taboo. Our study sheds new light on social media’s offline effects, as well as the consequences of increasingly common hard-right platforms.

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Profiling Insurrection: Characterizing Collective Action Using Mobile Device Data

Cited by 11 publications

References 89 publications

Out-group animosity drives engagement on social media

Out-group animosity drives engagement on social media

Partisan selective exposure and politically polarized attitudes toward disruptive protest

“Born for a Storm”: Hard-Right Social Media and Civil Unrest

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