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Trumping Hate on Twitter? Online Hate Speech in the 2016 U.S. Election Campaign and its Aftermath.
To what extent did online hate speech increase over Trump’s 2016 campaign and its aftermath? We analyzed over 750 million tweets, and observed no persisting increase in hate speech or white nationalist rhetoric.
Citation
Siegel, Alexandra A., Evgenii Nikitin, Pablo Barberá, Joanna Sterling, Bethany Pullen, Richard Bonneau, Jonathan Nagler, and Joshua A. Tucker. “Trumping Hate on Twitter? Online Hate Speech in the 2016 U.S. Election Campaign and Its Aftermath.” Quarterly Journal of Political Science 16, no. 1 (2021): 71–104. https://doi.org/10.1561/100.00019045
Date Posted
Jan 11, 2021
Authors
- Alexandra A. Siegel,
- Evgenii Nikitin,
- Pablo Barberá,
- Joanna Sterling,
- Bethany Pullen,
- Richard Bonneau,
- Jonathan Nagler,
- Joshua A. Tucker
Area of Study
Tags
Abstract
To what extent did online hate speech and white nationalist rhetoric on Twitter increase over the course of Donald Trump's 2016 presidential election campaign and its immediate aftermath? The prevailing narrative suggests that Trump's political rise — and his unexpected victory — lent legitimacy to and popularized bigoted rhetoric that was once relegated to the dark corners of the Internet. However, our analysis of over 750 million tweets related to the election, in addition to almost 400 million tweets from a random sample of American Twitter users, provides systematic evidence that hate speech did not increase on Twitter over this period. Using both machine-learning-augmented dictionary-based methods and a novel classification approach leveraging data from Reddit communities associated with the alt-right movement, we observe no persistent increase in hate speech or white nationalist language either over the course of the campaign or in the six months following Trump's election. While key campaign events and policy announcements produced brief spikes in hateful language, these bursts quickly dissipated. Overall we find no empirical support for the proposition that Trump's divisive campaign or election increased hate speech on Twitter.
Background
The prevailing narrative suggests that Trump's political rise — and his unexpected victory — lent legitimacy to and popularized bigoted rhetoric that was once relegated to the dark corners of the Internet. However, despite a wealth of anecdotal and small-scale empirical evidence of this “Trump effect,” little is known about how the quantity of online hate speech, or the number of individuals producing it, changed over the course of Trump’s 2016 campaign or in the aftermath of his election. To what extent did online hate speech and white nationalist rhetoric on Twitter increase over the course of Donald Trump's 2016 presidential election campaign and its immediate aftermath?
Study
To answer this, we conduct an analysis of over 750 million tweets related to the election, more specifically, over 150 million tweets referencing Hillary Clinton and related keywords, over 600 million tweets referencing Donald Trump and related keywords, and over 400 million tweets collected from a random sample of 500,000 American Twitter users. We then investigate the degree to which the quantity of hateful tweets and size of the population producing them on Twitter increased over the course of Trump’s campaign or following his election on November 8, 2016.
Results
Overall, we find no empirical support for the proposition that Trump's divisive campaign or election increased hate speech on Twitter. Although key campaign events and policy announcements produced brief spikes in hateful language, these bursts quickly dissipated, and we observe no persistent increase in hate speech or white nationalist language over the course of the campaign or in the six months following Trump's election. The extent to which this trend may have materialized in other online and offline forums — as well as in other parts of the Twittersphere not captured by our analysis — is beyond the scope of this paper and remains a subject for future research. Nevertheless, the fact that some of these potential negative consequences might have been driven by the perception that hateful speech was on the rise itself points to the importance of moving beyond anecdotal reports on hateful speech to rigorous empirical studies such as those presented here.