Are Generics and Negativity about Social Groups Common on Social Media? A Comparative Analysis of Twitter (X) Data
This study addresses the problem of understanding communication patterns and their effects on social media for researchers and policymakers, but it is incremental as it applies existing ML techniques to a new dataset.
The researchers tackled the prevalence and impact of generics about social groups on Twitter (X) by developing a machine learning classifier and analyzing over a million tweets, finding that 78% of tweets contained no generics, but those with generics received more likes and retweets, and negative tweets about political groups were more prevalent and retweeted than those about ethnic groups.
Generics (unquantified generalizations) are thought to be pervasive in communication and when they are about social groups, this may offend and polarize people because generics gloss over variations between individuals. Generics about social groups might be particularly common on Twitter (X). This remains unexplored, however. Using machine learning (ML) techniques, we therefore developed an automatic classifier for social generics, applied it to more than a million tweets about people, and analyzed the tweets. We found that most tweets (78%) about people contained no generics. However, tweets with social generics received more 'likes' and retweets. Furthermore, while recent psychological research may lead to the prediction that tweets with generics about political groups are more common than tweets with generics about ethnic groups, we found the opposite. However, consistent with recent claims that political animosity is less constrained by social norms than animosity against gender and ethnic groups, negative tweets with generics about political groups were significantly more prevalent and retweeted than negative tweets about ethnic groups. Our study provides the first ML-based insights into the use and impact of social generics on Twitter.