Exploring the Relationship Between Campaign Discourse on Facebook and the Public’s Comments: A Case Study of Incivility During the 2016 US Presidential Election

Abstract

Social media is now ubiquitously used by political campaigns, but less attention has been given to public discussions that take place on candidates’ free public accounts on social media. Also unclear is whether there is a relationship between campaign messaging and the tone of public comments. To address this gap, this article analyzes public comments on Facebook accounts of candidates Trump and Clinton during the US election presidential debates in 2016. We hypothesize that attack messages posted by the candidates predict uncivil reactions by the public and that the public is more likely to be uncivil when attacking candidates. We use content analysis, supervised machine learning, and text mining to analyze candidates’ posts and public comments. Our results suggest that Clinton was the target of substantially more uncivil comments. Negative messages by the candidates are not associated with incivility by the public, but comments are significantly more likely to be uncivil when the public is attacking candidates. These results suggest that the public discourse around political campaigns might be less affected by what campaigns post on social media than by the public’s own perceptions and feelings toward the candidates.

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

“…Stromer-Galley (2019) has established the concept of "controlled interactivity" to describe the tendency to deploy interactive features only to an extent that helps a candidate to get (re-)elected (see also Freelon, 2017). Yet, even if politicians do not have an interest in actual interaction, being on social media makes them approachable by citizens, who can easily post comments on the content politicians provide (Rossini et al, 2021a). Being directly associated with politicians' posts, the public comments on social media platforms may shape other users' perceptions of the candidate, the public's opinion, or of the addressed issues (for an overview see Ksiazek and Springer, 2018;Ziegele et al, 2018).…”

“…As the study by van Kessel et al (2020) does not have data on either the amount or the content of the user comments left on the social media posts, differences in users' commenting behavior resulting from the platform's or politicians' characteristics cannot be accounted for. However, building on existing research, there is reason to believe that the comments posted to the social media pages of Congresspeople might not always be friendly and constructive (Theocharis et al, 2020;Ward and McLoughlin, 2020;Rossini, 2021;Rossini et al, 2021a;Southern and Harmer, 2021).…”

“…Most of the research to date has focused on how politicians use social media, but not on how the public engages with their content and the factors that drive engagement as well as specific forms of (incivil) communication (see also Rossini et al, 2021a). As Xenos et al (2017) have outlined, how users respond to politicians' social media activity is determined by factors that the political actors can actively control (i.e., how they themselves are communicating), but also by factors beyond their control (i.e., their [attributed] sociodemographic identity; general characteristics of the social media platform).…”

Content Moderation of Speech in Political Discussions

“…Using survey data from a presidential election year, the Pew Research center estimated that 74% of registered voters participated in politics on a social media site, with the vast majority of these on Facebook (Pew Research center, 2012). Widespread use of social media for political messages enables comparisons between parties: For example, during the 2016 U.S. presidential debates, one campaign made personal attacks and name‐calling a common occurrence (Rossini et al, 2020). Similar phenomena have been observed in other countries: Ben‐David and Fernández found that Spanish extreme‐right parties posted discriminatory language on Facebook, which spurred followers to post hate speech attacking certain groups (Ben‐David, 2016).…”

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Social media platforms have been hailed as "politically disruptive communication technologies'' (Hong & Nadler, 2012). Individuals express opinions and engage with politicians, the press, and each other on social media, sometimes using offensive language (Rossini et al, 2020). Content moderation has been adopted by many social media platforms to screen and evaluate offensive speech.

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