Understanding the Causes and Consequences of Incivility in Social Media Political Posts

What are the origins and consequences of social media incivility? The project puts forward the idea that politicians’ behaviour on social media acts as a trigger for incivility. The project tests this theory via a collection of a large longitudinal Twitter dataset and crowdsourced machine learning algorithms to measure how social media polarise and elicit conflict. The project also involves online survey experiments to model citizen reactions to social media polarization and incivility. It seeks a better understanding of the micro-foundations of uncivil commentary to posts of a certain kind, and to explain how varying levels of hostility influence information processing, trust and polarization in politics. This is a collaborative project with Spyros Kosmidis (Principal Investigator, Oxford University) and is funded by a British Academy/Leverhulme Trust Small research grant and the University of Bremen’s Impulse Grants scheme.