Consistent w/@boralexander1@M_B_Petersen finding that online hostility reflects differences in who participates in political discussion online (cambridge.org/core/journals/…), we show commenters are unusually politically engaged & polarized.
Prior research has no baseline for assessing online comments so we compared FB comments w/comments we elicited from a public sample on those articles. Real-world comments and those from commenters were more toxic (using Perspective API).
Toxicity can spread:
-More toxic comments get more likes (except in most extreme cases), which can increase algorithmic exposure
-Randomly exposing participants to more toxic comments leads them to write more toxic comments themselves
PS For some reason, my PDF program was copying out fuzzy graphics, so here's the first tweet again with sharp graphics if you want something cleaner to RT!
No one should be comforted by the Milley news. Trump's instability and effort to overturn the election unfortunately inspired a new kind of norm violation. However well-intentioned it may have been, we don't want generals deciding to take over foreign policy from civilians.
Partisan gap wildly overstated. Majority of Rs are getting vaccinated too. The problem is the intensity is concentrated in the anti-vax and anti-anti-anti-vax elements of the base.
“there isn’t really any middle ground on overthrowing the government. And that is what Mr. Trump and his allies were up to in 2020, through both violent and nonviolent means — and continue to be up to today.” nytimes.com/2021/09/10/opi…
An ongoing, increasingly party-wide attack on the legitimacy of our electoral system
Thread. I RTd what appeared to be a credible story about it but had second thoughts yesterday in need for more verification and found out it had already fallen apart
Convergent evidence from survey/field experiments showing null effects of social norms & myths/facts messages on childhood vaccinations in VT.
This is one of the projects I'm most proud of in my career. Took >4 years to complete and would have been impossible without (a) our incredible partners at the Vermont Dept. of Health, Christine Finley and Meredith Graves, and (b) support from @theNASciences and Rita Allen Fdn.
The project was motivated by a simple question - can different or better messaging improve vaccine uptake? We have an increasing number of studies examining effects of message exposure on vaccine *intentions* but few or none examining effects on actual *behavior*.
Per @jbview, "Lawmakers on the D fringe are ideological outliers but not radicals; those on the R fringe are radical, but not necessarily policy outliers." bloomberg.com/opinion/articl… GOP base energized by undermining election, anti-COVID restrictions, and race backlash, not policy.
This is always true, of course - policy is boring! But elites have provided some anyway in part due to demands from activists. With few demands of that type, GOP now almost content-free. Trump dispensed with a platform in 2020 & not clear what policy ideas the party would offer.
Note: Parties always seem confused and disjointed when out of power. But typically ambitious politicians start developing policies and trying to build consensus for platform in next election. Hard to do that when base rewards closed circuit of Fox hits and social media posturing.