Politicians' discourse has become way more toxic online

New data backs up the hunches we’ve all felt while scrolling through our politicians’ latest utterances on social media.

Political debate has rarely been edifying for anyone involved. However, in the last decade or more, social media has pushed conversations about the future of our politics into an even more extreme space.

From warring political opponents dissing each other on social media to Donald Trump’s pronouncements on his own Truth Social platform, the tone and tenor of political conversation have gone drastically downhill.

You’re not just imagining it: a new study by researchers at two Amsterdam-based universities quantifies the scale at which politicians have taken to cheap criticism and talking points rather than nuanced political debate. Analyzing nearly 18 million posts on Twitter, now X, from public representatives in 17 countries over a five-year period beginning in 2017, the researchers found a stark increase in toxicity on social media from elected representatives.

The researchers looked at public comments by politicians in Belgium, France, Canada, Spain, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Ireland, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand and Poland. The data was gathered from Twitter, and the contents of each post analyzed with an API that measures toxicity.

Increasing toxicity

Some political analysts may think the rise is down to the rise of extreme right-wing parties across countries worldwide – and in many of those countries listed above, right-wing voices have edged into the mainstream – but even after controlling for factors behind their rise, the issue persists.

“This suggests that rising toxicity in politics is not merely an expression of national political conflicts, but part of a broader global shift in political dynamics,” the researchers write.

Indeed, toxicity, which is measured as incivility to other social media users and hostile language within posts, has nearly doubled in that time period.

The level of toxicity was highest among radical-right and opposition parties, while discussions around culture war topics were way more toxic than economic or welfare-related debates. However, while the mask may have slipped among many politicians and their public pronouncements on social media, the mask gets put back on when politicians need to assure their survival: toxicity dropped during election periods, as campaigning politicians tried to win votes.

Toxicity as a political tool

Despite temperatures cooling when an election is near, those outside of power bases tend towards toxic comments more frequently on social media. Parties in opposition tend to use more incivility than those in government, with people using toxicity strategically to gain attention, energize political bases, and challenge incumbents.

The culture wars that have racked public attention are those that are more likely than not to have toxic discussions around them. Migration, identity, nationalism, and LGBTQ+ rights were much more toxic than issues like welfare, economy, or education in the millions of posts analyzed by the researchers.

One brief time period that caused a dampening of toxicity online among politicians was the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak, which the researchers attribute to politicians being eager to ensure the public rallied around the drastic changes happening in society as a result of the dangers of the pandemic.

And despite the outsized impact of the current US president on political discourse – with his critics arguing that it has negatively affected debate and civility online and offline – the idea that we are not civil to one another online wasn’t unique to the US alone, suggesting there’s a broader shift in political point scoring going on that is more significant than a single country.