Detecting and Characterizing Political Incivility on Social Media

Researchers of political communication study the impact and perceptions of political incivility on social media. Yet, so far, relatively few works attempted to automatically detect and characterize political incivility. In our work, we study political incivility in Twitter, presenting several research contributions. First, we present state-of-the-art incivility detection results using a large dataset, which we collected and labeled via crowd sourcing. Importantly, we distinguish between uncivil political speech that is impolite and intolerant anti-democratic discourse. Applying political incivility detection at large-scale, we derive insights regarding the prevalence of this phenomenon across users, and explore the network characteristics of users who are susceptible to disseminating uncivil political content online. Finally, we propose an approach for modeling social context information about the tweet author alongside the tweet content, showing that this leads to significantly improved performance on the task of political incivility detection. This result holds promise for related tasks, such as hate speech and stance detection.