A wall of incivility? Public discourse and immigration in the 2016 U.S. Primaries

Abstract

This study uses computational methods to investigate public incivility in Facebook comments to campaign messages during the primaries of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election, focusing on candidates' posts about immigration. Specifically, we investigate the relationship between campaign messaging strategies, such as advocacy and attacks, and the presence of incivility in public comments. We find that Trump dominated both in terms of number of posts and of public conversation and was the least likely to receive uncivil comments. Attack messages by the candidates were more likely to receive uncivil comments, suggesting that campaign negativity may indeed affect how the public engages with candidates online. These findings are important because uncivil discourse may contribute to further polarize the public around the issues, which may in turn lead to more extreme views.

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

“…Effects resulting from personal characteristics of the posting politicians are overall weaker and opposite to the direction we expected based on previous research. In contrast to findings by Rossini et al (2021b), Republican Members of Congress in our sample were estimated to receive a higher share of incivility than Democrats. This, however, echoes findings by Su et al (2018) who found that Facebook user comments on conservative news sites are more likely to feature extreme incivility than those on liberal news sites.…”

“…In the context of political discussions, it could also be relevant with which party a Member of Congress is affiliated. An analysis by Rossini et al (2021b) shows that Democratic candidates seem to receive more incivil user comments than Republican candidates and Theocharis et al (2020) have found that politicians who adopt a more extreme ideological position are more regularly confronted with incivility on social media. Overall, the evidence thus far suggests that personal characteristics might be a crucial driving force for incivility, presumably resulting both from (user-sided) prejudices against certain social groups as well as (communicator-sided) differences in posting behavior.…”