Tweets from American politicians have become more incivil over the last decade; uncivil tweets tended to receive more approval and attention, publicly indexed by large quantities of “likes” and “retweets”

Incivility Is Rising Among American Politicians on Twitter. Jeremy A. Frimer et al. Social Psychological and Personality Science, April 28, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1177/19485506221083811

Abstract: We provide the first systematic investigation of trends in the incivility of American politicians on Twitter, a dominant platform for political communication in the United States. Applying a validated artificial intelligence classifier to all 1.3 million tweets made by members of Congress since 2009, we observe a 23% increase in incivility over a decade on Twitter. Further analyses suggest that the rise was partly driven by reinforcement learning in which politicians engaged in greater incivility following positive feedback. Uncivil tweets tended to receive more approval and attention, publicly indexed by large quantities of “likes” and “retweets” on the platform. Mediational and longitudinal analyses show that the greater this feedback for uncivil tweets, the more uncivil tweets were thereafter. We conclude by discussing how the structure of social media platforms might facilitate this incivility-reinforcing dynamic between politicians and their followers.

Keywords: incivility, political polarization, Twitter, social media, affective polarization