The Distorting Prism of Social Media: How Self-Selection and Exposure to Incivility Fuel Online Comment Toxicity

Abstract

Though prior studies have analyzed the textual characteristics of online comments about politics, less is known about how selection into commenting behavior and exposure to other people’s comments changes the tone and content of political discourse. This article makes three contributions. First, we show that frequent commenters on Facebook are more likely to be interested in politics, to have more polarized opinions, and to use toxic language in comments in an elicitation task. Second, we find that people who comment on articles in the real world use more toxic language on average than the public as a whole; levels of toxicity in comments scraped from media outlet Facebook pages greatly exceed what is observed in comments we elicit on the same articles from a nationally representative sample. Finally, we demonstrate experimentally that exposure to toxic language in comments increases the toxicity of subsequent comments.

Patterns of Incivility on U.S. Congress Members' Social Media Accounts: A Comprehensive Analysis of the Influence of Platform, Post, and Person Characteristics

“…Indeed, previous studies have found "significant spikes of abuse on particular days" (Ward and McLoughlin, 2020, p. 61; see also Su et al, 2018 for social media pages of news outlets), but also that incivility always seems to be prevalent on social media to a certain degree (Theocharis et al, 2020). As indicated above, research has also shown that incivility in the original post influences the amount of incivility in user comments (Gervais, 2017;Kim et al, 2021;Rega and Marchetti, 2021;Shmargad et al, 2021). This kind of "contagious incivility" has been associated with different mechanisms, with explanations ranging from behavioral mimicry to incivility increasing feelings of anger or changing social media users' perceived social norms (for an overview, see Kim et al, 2021).…”

“…As indicated above, research has also shown that incivility in the original post influences the amount of incivility in user comments (Gervais, 2017;Kim et al, 2021;Rega and Marchetti, 2021;Shmargad et al, 2021). This kind of "contagious incivility" has been associated with different mechanisms, with explanations ranging from behavioral mimicry to incivility increasing feelings of anger or changing social media users' perceived social norms (for an overview, see Kim et al, 2021). Interestingly, more incivil and emotionally charged comments also seem to attract more engagement on social media (Stieglitz and Dang-Xuan, 2013;Kim et al, 2021).…”

“…Of course, in democratic societies, political actors should be open to citizens' criticism, but the evidence suggests that criticism often goes hand in hand with the use of profanities or personal attacks (Rossini, 2021). Second, politicians regularly engage in incivil behavior themselves, which has been shown to be a trigger for "bottom-up incivility" (Rega and Marchetti, 2021, p. 125; see also Gervais, 2017;Kim et al, 2021). In addition, the specific characteristics of social media platforms are likely to amplify the problem of incivility.…”

“…This kind of "contagious incivility" has been associated with different mechanisms, with explanations ranging from behavioral mimicry to incivility increasing feelings of anger or changing social media users' perceived social norms (for an overview, see Kim et al, 2021). Interestingly, more incivil and emotionally charged comments also seem to attract more engagement on social media (Stieglitz and Dang-Xuan, 2013;Kim et al, 2021). This might create a vicious circle in which a combination of social media algorithms and "natural" usage behavior highlights incivil comments, which then leads to even more incivility.…”

“…Although 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. This decision is not only informed by methodological considerations related to our approach of automated incivility detection, but most importantly by the fact that incivility has been shown to be "contagious" (e.g., Kim et al, 2021;Rega and Marchetti, 2021). As such, incivility directed toward other users or even the issue addressed in a post might deteriorate the entire discussion, lead to more (targeted) incivility, and is thus likely to have the abovementioned negative consequences for both bystanders and the posting politicians.…”