TY - JOUR
T1 - The event-driven nature of online political hostility
T2 - How offline political events make online interactions more hostile
AU - Rasmussen, Stig Hebbelstrup Rye
AU - Petersen, Michael Bang
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of National Academy of Sciences.
PY - 2023/11
Y1 - 2023/11
N2 - Hostile interactions permeate political debates on social media, but what is driving the long-term developments in online political hostility? Prior research focuses on individual-level factors such as the dispositions of users or network-level factors such as echo chambers. Moving beyond these accounts, we develop and test an event-oriented explanation and demonstrate that over the course of the 2020 election year in the United States, all major shifts in political hostility on the social media platform Twitter were driven by external offline events. Importantly, these events were magnified by Twitter users within the most politically hostile and most ideologically homogeneous networks. Further contributing to the individual and network-oriented accounts, we show that divisive offline events mobilized individual users not already disposed for hostility and may have helped facilitate the formation of echo chambers. The dynamics of online interactions - including their level of hostility - seem crucially dependent on developments in the offline world.
AB - Hostile interactions permeate political debates on social media, but what is driving the long-term developments in online political hostility? Prior research focuses on individual-level factors such as the dispositions of users or network-level factors such as echo chambers. Moving beyond these accounts, we develop and test an event-oriented explanation and demonstrate that over the course of the 2020 election year in the United States, all major shifts in political hostility on the social media platform Twitter were driven by external offline events. Importantly, these events were magnified by Twitter users within the most politically hostile and most ideologically homogeneous networks. Further contributing to the individual and network-oriented accounts, we show that divisive offline events mobilized individual users not already disposed for hostility and may have helped facilitate the formation of echo chambers. The dynamics of online interactions - including their level of hostility - seem crucially dependent on developments in the offline world.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85179472967&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad382
DO - 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad382
M3 - Journal article
C2 - 38024418
AN - SCOPUS:85179472967
SN - 2752-6542
VL - 2
JO - PNAS Nexus
JF - PNAS Nexus
IS - 11
M1 - pgad382
ER -