The idea of aggression in social media is not an unexplored topic in research. However, there does tend to be a gap between the distinction of aggression in the form of attacking another online in a single offhand comment, and cyberbullying, where the attacker is actively pursuing to emotionally harm their target. It is important to note that people in western cultures, when not behind a computer, usually tend to be polite to one another, and actively avoid making offhand aggressive comments (Papacharissi, 2004: 262). Other research has shown that while people who make friends on Facebook are usually similar in that they share similar ideals due to homophily, a theory which states that people who are alike tend to become friends, are still often exposed to content which differs from a user’s ideology (Bakshy et al., 2015: 1130). Bakshy et al. further note that despite friends of a user may be posting “ideologically cross-cutting” content, the algorithm Facebook uses to rank what a user sees on their timeline will rank said content lower, altering the risk for exposure to cross-cutting content. The fact that Facebook uses algorithms to lower the risk of exposure to cross-cutting content seems to imply that there may be some social “danger” between friends who may disagree on a certain opinion based topic.
While homophily tends to bring people on Facebook together as friends, there seems to be more exposure to ideologically differing content on other social media websites, namely twitter. Jon Ronson, in a TED talk filmed in June of 2015 talked about how Twitter has become an extremely powerful social tool which has the power to not only bring millions of people together, but bring them together to destroy a single person’s life because of a joke. He cites what happened to Justine Sacco, a woman (with only 170 followers to begin with) who posted on Twitter the joke “Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white!” Justine got on the plane, and got off to find that her misinterpreted satirical joke had caused thousands upon thousands of people to berate her, call for her firing, and threaten her life. Examples of tweets directed to Justine include “Somebody HIV-positive should rape this bitch and then we'll find out if her skin color protects her from AIDS”, “@JustineSacco last tweet of your career. #SorryNotSorry” (Ronson, 2015). This example of backlash on Twitter shows how quickly (within a 12-hour plane ride) people are to jump to insult someone and take joy in their downfall, to the point of ruining their lives.
In this study, public conversations from Facebook and the comment section of Reddit posts were analyzed. The comments from the participants in the conversations are examined to see what percentage of the total amount include insults and/or aggressive outbursts in their comments. These two means of social media were chosen because they are often seen as open forums for discussion when a topic is arisen. These conversations are taken directly from posts that are meant to promote discussion or display an opinion of their own, and have a large amount of comments from people who have differing ideologies. Namely, conversations containing traditionally controversial topic, such as gun control, feminist ideals, and political opinions were chosen because they tend to draw a large amount of people to join in on the discussion.
The data collected from the above sources are analyzed using objective word counting. In normal, polite discussions it is not very common to use derogatory, insulting, or curse words, so the comment section of each source is scanned for the number of times a word associated within those three categories are stated. In this study, derogatory and insulting words include the following: Racial slurs, disrespectful name-calling, body shaming, scornful comments, threats, and judgmental comments toward intellect or being. This method of data collection was chosen out of convenience due to the extremely large amount of comments exposed to in this study.
The first discussion analyzed was a Facebook post concerning gun control. Out of the 2,503 comments, 1,000 were analyzed along with the replies to approximately 50% of those comments. Out of the comments analyzed, 159 (13.25%) included aggressive words and phrases that fit within the three categories listed above. The second Facebook discussion concerned socialism. Out of the 367 comments here, 49 (13.35%) included any of the phrases.
The first Reddit discussion stemmed from a reply to a comment regarding the fact that on average per school, more women are currently in college than men. The comment “Sounds like we need to work on getting more guys into college” was followed by a reply calling the initial commenter sexist. In this discussion, out of 84 comments, 15 (17.86%) included any of the phrases. Finally, a discussion about child labor, including 81 comments contained 12 (14.81%) included the phrases.
The findings in this paper conclude that there tends to be an abundance of aggressive comments and phrases shown within social media, and some major themes shown in these results show that between 13% and 18% of all content analyzed included aggressive phrases. However, due to the nature of this paper, there are a number of limitations that could be improved upon had this research been extended. Namely, the number of discussions analyzed should be expanded upon, and the comments referenced should be analyzed by more than one research so there is a more concrete, understanding of what deems a comment aggressive. Furthermore research should be done on a number of threads that don’t cover controversial topics so a conclusion can be made about general online conversation.
Bakshy, E., Messing, S., & Adamic, L. (2015). Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook. Science, 1130-1132.
Papacharissi, Z. (2004). Democracy online: Civility, politeness, and the democratic potential of online political discussion groups. New Media & Society, 259-283.
Ronson, J. (2015, June). Jon Ronson: When Online Shaming Spirals out of Control [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/jon_ronson_what_happens_when_online_shaming_spirals_out_of_control?language=en#t-210564