High prevalence of antagonizing rhetoric in trending topics on Twitter/X

Armin Pournaki, Eckehard Olbrich

Disagreement between political opponents is a central element of democracy. This disagreement can be voiced in different ways. An opponent can be antagonized, i.e. portrayed as an enemy that needs to be overcome, or they can be criticized, i.e. treated as a legitimate adversary with whom one can engage. While the latter is a fundamental part of democratic exchange, the former can be detrimental to public discourse. Political disagreement increasingly takes place on social media, where negativity towards political out-groups has been found to drive engagement. However, existing research has largely treated such negativity as a single dimension, leaving open whether it is antagonization or criticism that circulates on these platforms. This work addresses this gap by introducing a computational approach to detect these two types of rhetoric in text and identify its targets. On a corpus of over 17 million tweets from trending topics in the German Twittersphere, the method reveals that about a third of all tweets contain antagonizing rhetoric. Comparing tweets from trending topics to a random sample shows that the discourse in trending topics is systematically more antagonizing than…