We think we know Why Politics pisses us off so much.
“It is usually said that political discourse is not civilized because there are differences either in ideology or in identity. So if your political group is attacked, you will react,” he says Michalis MamakosNorthwestern postdoctoral fellow.
But a new study finds that our collective thinking about toxic political discourse overlooks something important—that some people make toxic comments regardless of the topic. So trolls will troll, no matter what they’re talking about.
In this study, Mamakos collaborated with Eli Finkelprofessor of management and organizations at Kellogg, to analyze comment patterns on various topics on Reddit, a popular online discussion forum.
“Prevailing theories to explain the toxicity of political discourse focus either on substantive disagreement—over abortion, for example—or on the competing social identities of Democrat and Republican,” observes Finkel. “But none of these theories have anything to say about whether partisans should be particularly toxic when politics is irrelevant—when we’re talking about movies or gardening or whatever. Our findings suggest that an important reason why our political discourse is toxic is that toxic people are particularly likely to choose to participate.”
The researchers see the finding as hopeful, as it suggests that political discussions are not doomed to become harmful in a way that other discussions are not. Rather, they are harmful in part because they are dominated by a few loud, rude voices.
“The toxicity we see in online political contexts is an overrepresentation of the people who choose to choose them,” says Mamakos. “And these people drive away the nicest people who don’t want to get involved in this kind of conflict. This over-representation provides a misleading picture of the seriousness of the divide.”
Generalized and specific toxicity
Reddit stands out as an ideal platform for studying online discussions, researchers say. Not only is it more popular in the US than Facebook and X, but it’s also less dependent on algorithms to artificially curate what users see.
Reddit’s individual forums, called “subreddits,” are created by users and cover a wide range of topics. Mamakos and Finkel took advantage of the fact that some of these subreddits are more concentrated than others in terms of the political affiliations of their users. While some subreddits have overt political affiliations—such as r/hillaryclinton or r/The_Donald—others do not, but are still heavily populated by Redditors who tend to engage in left- or right-wing political affiliations (for example, r/librarians warped liberals in its user base, and r/wrestling skews conservative).
For the purposes of their research, Mamakos and Finkel referred to any of these highly segregated subreddits as “partisan”—whether they were explicitly political or not. Subreddits that skewed neither liberal nor conservative, such as r/movies and r/programming, were considered nonpartisan.
First, the researchers set out to determine whether more partisan subreddits were more toxic than less partisan ones. To do this, they analyzed comments on 9,000 distinct subreddits over a period from 2011 to 2022 and measured toxicity using Google’s PerspectiveAPI classifier, which uses artificial intelligence to assess the likelihood that a comment is “rude, disrespectful or unreasonable and you’re likely to get someone to leave a conversation.”
Unsurprisingly, the most partisan subreddits are also the most toxic. But do the Redditors who comment in these partisan hangouts bring a similar level of profligacy to less partisan places? That is, were these toxic commenters specialists (targeting only political discourse) or generalists (equal opportunity offenders)?
The researchers’ analysis suggests they are the latter. Mamakos and Finkel’s second step was to analyze the hundreds of millions of comments generated by some 6.3 million Redditors over the same 11-year period. They found that users whose behavior is particularly toxic in partisan settings remain so in non-partisan settings. Furthermore, especially in non-partisan subreddits, the speech of people who comment at all in partisan contexts is ruder and ruder than that of people who do not engage in these spaces.
And the rudest of the rude? Those who comment on both liberal and conservative subreddits.
This suggests that the concern that toxicity results from partisan echo chambers may be misplaced. Toxic comments on nonpartisan subreddits were more prevalent among people who commented on both left- and right-wing subreddits than among those who commented on only one or the other. (Comments from these liberal and conservative partisans were, interestingly enough, almost equally toxic).
The researchers ruled out the possibility that Redditors learned their bad behavior in party arenas before taking it elsewhere. They conducted a longitudinal analysis of users who spent time on more partisan subreddits to analyze whether their comments on nonpartisan subreddits became less political as a function of time spent among partisan Redditors. The researchers concluded that this type of socialization played no role.
Log out
Mamakos finds limitations on social media platforms’ incentives to take steps to limit the activity of particularly loud and rude users. After all, the polarization and militancy on these sites fuel the engagement that drives their profits.
Instead, the best way to diffuse online toxicity may be for each of us, as individuals, to resist letting rudeness define the terms of engagement. In other words, don’t feed the trolls.
“It’s normal to find it gratifying when people on our side are toxic to people on the other side,” says Finkel. “But when both sides amplify such content, the information ecosystem becomes dark, leaving us with the false impression that the opposing partisans are demons. In such a climate, we risk prioritizing partisan victory over democratic fair play.”
“The point is not to avoid conflict altogether. we can argue, disagree,” says Mamakos. “All this is part of the democratic discourse. The point is to approach discussions with the other side with an open mind and empathy.”
