Incivility in Congressional Tweets

Ballard, Andrew; DeTamble, Ryan; Dorsey, Spencer; Heseltine, Michael; Johnson, Marcus

doi:10.1177/1532673x221109516

Cited by 8 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…This approach, centered around the fostering of political division, maps neatly onto the rhetorical approaches of political elites on social media and aligns with the definition of polarizing rhetoric utilized in previous academic research in this area (e.g. Ballard et al, 2022b; Russell, 2018). Importantly, this does not merely encompass discussion of divisive topics (which can very much still be done in a non-polarizing fashion) and this concept is also distinct from polarized rhetoric, which merely implies the presence of dichotomous rhetorical strategies used by different groups, but does not necessarily speak to the tone or manner in which this is done.…”

Section: Polarizing Rhetoricmentioning

confidence: 94%

“…These messages were then classified for polarizing rhetoric using a fine-tuned supervised machine learning process, based on an updating of an established tweet classifier from Ballard et al (2022b). Ballard et al’s original polarizing rhetoric classifier is specifically trained using a hand-coding of 5000 congressional tweets across the period 2007 to 2020, effectively training a classification model directly attuned to the rhetorical techniques of elected officials in the United States.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Indeed, elected officials and political candidates in 2020 were more uncivil in their social media communications than ever before (Heseltine & Dorsey, 2022) and showed little signs of reducing levels of divisive rhetoric (Ballard et al, 2022b), largely in part due to concurrent hotly contested congressional and presidential elections in 2020 which also incentivized party polarized competition and division.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Polarizing Online Elite Rhetoric at the Federal, State, and Local Level During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Heseltine

2023

American Politics Research

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Times of national and international crisis are often unifying events which lower levels of division within the public and between political elites. Yet, COVID-19 pandemic responses in the United States have been viewed as markedly polarized. Using a comprehensive dataset of over four million social media posts sent by local, state, and federal level political officials between January 2020 and September 2022, this paper explores the extent to which the COVID-19 pandemic was a rhetorically unifying or divisive event, and whether rhetorical responses differed across levels of government. The results show that federal level officials were less likely to message about COVID-19 and were more likely to do so in a polarizing fashion compared to state and local officials. Temporally, in the early stages of the pandemic there was indeed a collective rhetorical de-polarization across all levels of government. However, as the pandemic progressed, COVID-related messaging became more polarizing, especially among Republicans. Evidence also emerges of dynamic responsiveness from elected officials, with relativeness attentiveness to COVID increasing and polarizing rhetoric decreasing during time periods when local case counts were relatively high. These findings suggest that rhetorical unity is still possible, even in times of high political polarization, but that this unity is also short-lived and tempered by political and electoral considerations.

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Section: Polarizing Rhetoricmentioning

confidence: 94%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Polarizing Online Elite Rhetoric at the Federal, State, and Local Level During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Heseltine

2023

American Politics Research

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“…Since its launch in 2007, Twitter has become a popular and easy way for politicians to directly communicate with constituents (Munger et al, 2016). Research to this point has found that Twitter is used by political elites to express partisan and ideological positions, share relevant policy information (Ballard et al, 2022(Ballard et al, , 2023Lee & Shin, 2012), and highlight personal stories (Arbour & McGowen, 2017;Lee & Oh, 2013;McGregor, 2018). The wide-ranging content broadcast by candidates and campaigns reflects their sensitivity to the varied types of information voters seek (Lipsitz et al, 2005).…”

Section: Theory and Previous Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Building Support Through the Personalization of Twitter Messages in a Permanent Campaign

Gaynor

Gimpel

2023

American Politics Research

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Not all aspects of a campaign are issue-oriented, nor are many voters. A candidate builds mass support largely by appearing warm, friendly, and likable, not only by propagating their viewpoints on controversial issues. Based on a prominent candidate’s Twitter accounts and the associated analytics, our research analyzes the online content and reaction to every post across a four-year period, both before and after a major general election. Twitter’s analytic measures demonstrate how a campaign uses social media to accomplish very different outreach goals. Warm and non-politically oriented messages attract broad support in the form of audience likes but are not retweeted with as much frequency as messages that are less liked but more politically pointed. The undeniable popularity of personal, earnest messages underscores the power of the social media platform to present candidates in an approachable and convivial way, despite the necessity of taking positions on difficult issues.

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“…A further implication is that we have no reason to expect variation based on ideological extremity per se, as it is ideological predilection rather than placement that we expect to matter. This is the crux of the asymmetry versus symmetry accounts -the former, as explained, predict differential response based on policy topics and toxicity while a version of the latter would suggest similar ideological responses but with extremists on both sides generating more variation, potentially being more toxic (e.g., (Schraufnagel et al 2021;Ballard et al 2022). Understanding whether there is ideological asymmetry in retweeting behaviors has substantial implications for isolating the information environments to which those with different ideologies are exposed.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Liberals Engage With More Diverse Policy Topics and Toxic Content Than Conservatives on Social Media

Chang¹,

Druckman²,

Ferrara³

et al. 2023

Preprint

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The rise of social media provides citizens with direct access to information shared by political elites. Yet, more than ever before, citizens play a critical role in diffusing elite-generated content. What kinds of content spread on social media? Do conservative and liberal citizens differ in the elite content with which they engage? These questions relate to long-standing academic and popular debates about whether political behavior is symmetric or asymmetric with respect to political ideology. We analyze more than 13 million users’ retweets of messages by U.S. Members of Congress on Twitter from 2009 to 2019, leveraging estimates of users’ political ideology constructed from over 3.5 billion prior retweets. We find limited evidence for ideological symmetry where the strength of ideology predicts diffusion choices similarly, on the left and right. In contrast, we find robust support for ideological asymmetry. Consistent with theories of ideological asymmetry, liberals retweeted a more diverse set of policy topics than conservatives by 19.4%. They also engaged more with toxic content from in-group elites by 56%. Given the tendency for people to follow like-minded others on social media, these diffusion patterns imply that liberals are exposed to more politically diverse and toxic elite-generated content on social media, while conservatives receive more politically homogeneous and less toxic content. The demand and supply dynamics of political information suggest the existence of divergent polarized information bubbles such that liberals and conservatives reside in distinct information ecosystems.

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Incivility in Congressional Tweets

Cited by 8 publications

References 46 publications

Polarizing Online Elite Rhetoric at the Federal, State, and Local Level During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Polarizing Online Elite Rhetoric at the Federal, State, and Local Level During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Building Support Through the Personalization of Twitter Messages in a Permanent Campaign

Liberals Engage With More Diverse Policy Topics and Toxic Content Than Conservatives on Social Media

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