Violent political rhetoric on Twitter
Open accessAbstract
Violent hostility between ordinary partisans is undermining American democracy. Social media is blamed for rhetoric threatening violence against political opponents and implicated in offline political violence. Focusing on Twitter, I propose a method to identify such rhetoric and investigate substantive patterns associated with it. Using a data set surrounding the 2020 Presidential Election, I demonstrate that violent tweets closely track contentious politics offline, peaking in the days preceding the Capitol Riot. Women and Republican politicians are targeted with such tweets more frequently than men and non-Republican politicians. Violent tweets, while rare, spread widely through communication networks, reaching those without direct ties to violent users on the fringe of the networks. This paper is the first to make sense of violent partisan hostility expressed online, contributing to the fields of partisanship, contentious politics, and political communication.
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These market incentives both reflect and exacerbate ideological and affective forms of polarization, insofar as emotionally charged material, such as that which is contemptuous of ideological adversaries, is more likely to go 'viral' than more measured types of political discourse.
“These market incentives both reflect and exacerbate ideological and affective forms of polarization, insofar as emotionally charged material, such as that which is contemptuous of ideological adversaries, is more likely to go ‘viral’ than more measured types of political discourse260,263,269,270.”
From Cognitive–motivational mechanisms of political polarization in social-communicative contexts (2022) · cites this paper as [263]
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Cognitive–motivational mechanisms of political polarization in social-communicative contexts
Jost, J. T., Baldassarri, D. S., & Druckman, J. N. (2022) · Nature Reviews Psychology · doi:10.1038/s44159-022-00093-5 · Cited by 276 · see citing works
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- Authors
- Kim, T.
- Affiliations
- Pennsylvania State University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Kim, Taegyoon
- ORCID
- Kim, Taegyoon
- Venue
- Political Science Research and Methods
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press (CUP)
- Published
- 2022-05-31
- Volume
- 11
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 673-695
- ISSN
- 2049-8470 (ISSN-L)
- 2049-8489
- OpenAlex
- W4289296842
- Cited by
- 43
- References
- 7
- Citations by year
- 2026: 3 · 2025: 11 · 2024: 6 · 2023: 20 · 2022: 3
- FWCI
- 15.24
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Locations
- Political Science Research and Methods (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Communication › Social Media and Politics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
- Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Populism, Right-Wing Movements
- Keywords
- Twitter, 2020 US presidential election, Capitol riot, partisan hostility, contentious politics, Republican politicians, communication networks
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