Out-group animosity drives engagement on social media

被引:255
作者
Rathje, Steve [1 ]
Van Bavel, Jay J. [2 ]
van der Linden, Sander [1 ]
机构
[1] Univ Cambridge, Dept Psychol, Cambridge CB2 3RQ, England
[2] NYU, Dept Psychol, Ctr Neural Sci, 6 Washington Pl, New York, NY 10003 USA
基金
英国经济与社会研究理事会;
关键词
social media; polarization; intergroup; out-group; social identity; MORALIZED CONTENT; NEWS; POLARIZATION; DIFFUSION; PARTISANSHIP; OPINION; MODEL; SELF;
D O I
10.1073/pnas.2024292118
中图分类号
O [数理科学和化学]; P [天文学、地球科学]; Q [生物科学]; N [自然科学总论];
学科分类号
07 ; 0710 ; 09 ;
摘要
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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页数:9
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