Twitter Runs On Hate -- But Its Users Don't Reflect Real Life

A new study finds that divisive content is king on Twitter, but that's not because we prefer it.

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By now, it’s no surprise to anyone that social media is battleground, especially when we’re talking about controversial topics like what’s in the news or in leading political debates.

But why are social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter such hostile places? One possible explanation is that they’re simply giving us what we want to see. Algorithms are designed to maximize our time on these sites, and there is no reason for us to be fed content that would bore us and lead us to walk away from our computers, tablets, or smartphones. Is social media simply a reflection of who we are?

That explanation has never sat well with me. When I walk outside, I’m not dodging angry crowds throwing tomatoes at me or witnessing massive brawls over the latest meme or bad Tweet. In fact, sometimes I’ll meet people in real life who I’ve only known through social media, and it turns out they’re completely different in-person. Usually, they’re much more chill.

So what is it about social media that seems to bring out the worst in people? A new study offers some answers about one of these platforms: Twitter.

Divisive content runs Twitter — but not real life

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Gordon Heltzel is a social psychologist at the University of British Columbia who has spent years looking at political polarization.

Some years ago, he conducted a study finding that North Americans actually like it when people on their political side try to understand the other side.

“We were kind of surprised by this, so we ran a lot of studies kind of tweaking elements of it. The effect was really hard to go away and it also ended up being a pretty big effect,” Heltzel explained in an interview.

So Heltzel and his co-author decided to dig deeper and look into how people interact on social media. They published the results in a paper called “Why Twitter Sometimes Rewards What Most People Disapprove of: The Case of Cross-Party Political Relations.”

If people like open-mindedness, why do big social media platforms seem to be full of people attacking the other side rather than seeking to understand them?

“So we were like, maybe social media is the real world?” he said, wondering if maybe it really does just function as a mirror of ourselves.

In order to study that question, they gathered tweets from 100 U.S. Senators over a period of several years (all Tweets were gathered before 2021, so Twitter was under the previous ownership).

They categorized these Tweets as either dismissive — attacking the other side — or engaging, where the Senators were trying to work with their political opponents.

They then looked at how Twitter users engaged with these Tweets. Unsurprisingly, more dismissive Tweets got more Likes and Retweets.

But when they surveyed the broader public, they found a preference for the engaging Tweets — not the divisive ones.

So what’s going on here?

Part of the answer, Heltzel suggested, was that the people who are driving political conversations on Twitter aren’t representative of the broader public. Their study found that the “frequent reactors” — people who spend a lot of time interacting with Tweets — are more politically extreme than other people.

“To the extent that these people have really strong opinions about stuff, they might be selecting into these sort of political discussions, and then by showing those people sort of negative content and stuff like that, they care more about it, so they’re going to engage and stay on the platform,” he explained.

Interestingly, Heltzel’s study found that even the people who prefer the engaging content would still be more likely to Like or Retweet the more dismissive content, suggesting that they may be engaging in this way because they know that it’s how you get ahead on Twitter. If you want to step into the arena, you’d better be ready to brawl.

Preventing a self-fulfilling prophecy

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As anyone who’s followed the media brouhahas of the past few years knows, Twitter has become a sort of de-facto editor for much of the news media. Nervous reporters and editors often fear a social media backlash to their pieces, and there’s a sense that they’re writing not for a broader public audience but for the angry people who show up to complain when they don’t like something. Social media has turned every publication in America into a town hall meeting with the same five people showing up every Wednesday to yell at their least favored commissioner.

Something everybody has to remember is that the people who yell at you are often not representative of much at all.

One 2019 survey by Pew found that just a quarter of Americans were using Twitter at all, and that 6% of Americans are who they called “prolific tweeters,” meaning that they make up the lion’s share of politics tweets.

Does any of this mean that Twitter or social media political discussion is fruitless?

No, there are interesting people to meet and useful bits of information you can gather from social media. But the general public and the people who drive discussion on a platform like Twitter are entirely different.

There’s a reason why, say, Joe Biden won the 2020 Democratic presidential primary or Eric Adams won the Democratic mayoral primary in New York City when both candidates had a very small social media footprint compared to their opponents.

When someone angrily denounces me, I have to remember that this is someone who is obsessed with politics, feeds off of negativity, and probably doesn’t act this way in real life (where you’re not rewarded in the same way for being a jerk).

It’s a lesson I hope everyone can remember. Because if we start living in the fiction that Twitter is actually real life, it could one day become a self-fulfilling prophecy.