Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook

The social media discourse of engaged partisans is toxic even when politics are irrelevant

Abstract Prevailing theories of partisan incivility on social media suggest that it derives from disagreement about political issues or from status competition between groups. This study—which analyzes the commenting behavior of Reddit users across diverse cultural contexts (subreddits)—tests the alternative hypothesis that such incivility derives in large part from a selection effect: Toxic people are especially likely to opt into discourse in partisan contexts. First, we examined commenting behavior across over 9,000 unique cultural contexts (subreddits) and confirmed that discourse is indeed more toxic in partisan (e.g. r/progressive, r/conservatives) than in nonpartisan contexts (e.g. r/movies, r/programming). Next, we analyzed hundreds of millions of comments from over 6.3 million users and found robust evidence that: (i) the discourse of people whose behavior is especially toxic in partisan contexts is also especially toxic in nonpartisan contexts (i.e. people are not politics-only toxicity specialists); and (ii) when considering only nonpartisan contexts, the discourse of people who also comment in partisan contexts is more toxic than the discourse of people who do not. These effects were not driven by socialization processes whereby people overgeneralized toxic behavioral norms they had learned in partisan contexts. In contrast to speculation about the need for partisans to engage beyond their echo chambers, toxicity in nonpartisan contexts was higher among people who also comment in both left-wing and right-wing contexts (bilaterally engaged users) than among people who also comment in only left-wing or right-wing contexts (unilaterally engaged users). The discussion considers implications for democratic functioning and theories of polarization.

W — Trust your feed

We believe in the need for a global, trusted social media platform owned, run, and hosted in Europe. W is built on verified human users, transparency, privacy, and free speech.

W — Trust your feed

We believe in the need for a global, trusted social media platform owned, run, and hosted in Europe. W is built on verified human users, transparency, privacy, and free speech.

W — Trust your feed

We believe in the need for a global, trusted social media platform owned, run, and hosted in Europe. W is built on verified human users, transparency, privacy, and free speech.

W — Trust your feed

We believe in the need for a global, trusted social media platform owned, run, and hosted in Europe. W is built on verified human users, transparency, privacy, and free speech.

W — Trust your feed

We believe in the need for a global, trusted social media platform owned, run, and hosted in Europe. W is built on verified human users, transparency, privacy, and free speech.

W — Trust your feed

We believe in the need for a global, trusted social media platform owned, run, and hosted in Europe. W is built on verified human users, transparency, privacy, and free speech.

Mozilla and the Washington Post Are Reinventing Online Comments | The Mozilla Blog

To engage readers, build community, and strengthen journalism, Mozilla’s open-source commenting platform will be integrated across washingtonpost.com

Sharing without clicking on news in social media

Social media have enabled laypersons to disseminate, at scale, links to news and public affairs information. Many individuals share such links without first reading the linked information. Here we analysed over 35 million public Facebook posts with uniform resource locators shared between 2017 and 2020, and discovered that such ‘shares without clicks’ (SwoCs) constitute around 75% of forwarded links. Extreme and user-aligned political content received more SwoCs, with partisans engaging in it more than politically neutral users. In addition, analyses with 2,969 false uniform resource locators revealed higher shares and, hence, SwoCs by conservatives (76.94%) than liberals (14.25%), probably because, in our dataset, the vast majority (76–82%) of them originated from conservative news domains. Findings suggest that the virality of political content on social media (including misinformation) is driven by superficial processing of headlines and blurbs rather than systematic processing of core content, which has design implications for promoting deliberate discourse in the online public sphere.

W-Social: What does sovereignty mean for social media? – Open Future

The European Commission’s move to W-Social frames it as a European alternative to X, but its closed-source code and reliance on Bluesky’s infrastructure show that sovereign social media requires open infrastructure—not European ownership alone.

EU praises open source for tech sovereignty — then backs W, a private for-profit microblogging platform

To fundamentally understand why it's strange the EU Commission is throwing its weight behind this new for-profit social platform, you need to understand what lies beneath.

EU praises open source for tech sovereignty — then backs W, a private for-profit microblogging platform

To fundamentally understand why it's strange the EU Commission is throwing its weight behind this new for-profit social platform, you need to understand what lies beneath.

Improving social media for democratic discourse

Social media have expanded opportunities for communication and political participation, but today's dominant platforms are optimized primarily for engagement and advertising revenue, contributing...

The social media discourse of engaged partisans is toxic even when politics are irrelevant

Abstract. Prevailing theories of partisan incivility on social media suggest that it derives from disagreement about political issues or from status compet