American politicians are becoming increasingly rude and disrespectful on Twitter

By Matthew Warren If you’ve been on social media at all in the last decade, you may have noticed it becoming an increasingly toxic environment. Antisocial language is on the rise — but not only among the general public. An analysis of hundreds of thousands of tweets from US Members of Congress has found that the language in their posts has become more and more rude and disrespectful since 2009. And this seems to be because uncivil tweets are rewarded with more retweets and likes, a finding that highlights the perverse incentives driving the way we communicate with each other on social media. The researchers, led by Jeremy Frimer from the University of Winnipeg, collected all the tweets made by Members of Congress between 2009 and 2019. To measure how civil the tweets were, they used Perspective API, a tool that scores language on a scale from 0 to 100 based on how likely it is that someone would find it rude or disrespectful. The researchers also analysed the tweets from the two presidents in office over this period — Barack Obama and Donald Trump — as well as from one million random Twitter users who were not politicians. The researchers found that the average incivility score of the politicians’ tweets rose by 23% across the period, from 11.8 in 2009 to 14.5 in 2019. Incivility in the general public’s tweets rose as well, from a score of 21.1 in 2009 to 27 in 2019 — but the increase in uncivil language among politicians was independent of this mo...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Political Twitter Source Type: blogs