Mapping Election Toxicity on Social Media across Issue, Ideology, and Psychosocial Dimensions

TL;DR

This study analyzes online political toxicity during the 2024 U.S. election, revealing issue-specific patterns, emotional drivers, and ideological differences in harmful social media content.

Contribution

It introduces a large-scale, multi-dimensional analysis of election-related toxicity, combining issue categorization, ideology estimation, and psycholinguistic profiling.

Findings

Toxicity varies significantly across issues and ideologies.

Harassment is the most prevalent harmful content, especially in identity-related debates.

Toxic discourse is characterized by high-arousal negative emotions and emotional mirroring between partisan groups.

Abstract

Online political hostility is pervasive, yet it remains unclear how toxicity varies across campaign issues and political ideology, and what psychosocial signals and framing accompany toxic expression online. In this work, we present a large-scale analysis of discourse on X (Twitter) during the five weeks surrounding the 2024 U.S. presidential election. We categorize posts into 10 major campaign issues, estimate the ideology of posts using a human-in-the-loop LLM-assisted annotation process, detect harmful content with an LLM-based toxicity detection model, and then examine the psychological drivers of toxic content. We use these annotated data to examine how harmful content varies across campaign issues and ideologies, as well as how emotional tone and moral framing shape toxicity in election discussions. Our results show issue heterogeneity in both the prevalence and intensity of toxicity. Identity-related issues displayed the highest toxicity intensity. As for specific harm categories, harassment was most prevalent and intense across most of the issues, while hate concentrated in identity-centered debates. Partisan posts contained more harmful content than neutral posts, and ideological asymmetries in toxicity varied by issue. In terms of psycholinguistic dimensions, we found that toxic discourse is dominated by high-arousal negative emotions. Left- and right-leaning posts often exhibit similar emotional profiles within the same issue domain, suggesting emotional mirroring. Partisan groups frequently rely on overlapping moral foundations, while issue context strongly shapes which moral foundations become most salient. These findings provide a fine-grained account of toxic political discourse on social media and highlight that online political toxicity is highly context-dependent, underscoring the need for issue-sensitive approaches to measuring and mitigating it.