ArticlePNAS nexus2023
The social media discourse of engaged partisans is toxic even when politics are irrelevant.
Article in PNAS nexus, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed, 24 citations in OpenAlex.
- Online toxic speech as positioning acts: Hate as discursive mechanisms for othering and belonging.New media & society · 2026Article
- Social media users experience more political hostility in less economically equal and less democratic societies.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- From toxicity to conformity: adaptive user behavior to social norms in Telegram communities.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Political partisanship and perceived partisan threat relate to simple trust decisions.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2026Article
- The cultural ecology of social media.Evolutionary human sciences · 2026Article
- Article
- Tracking patterns in toxicity and antisocial behavior over user lifetimes on large social media platforms.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Article
- Patterns of partisan toxicity and engagement reveal the common structure of online political communication across countries.Nature communications · 2024Article
- The offline roots of online hostility: Adult and childhood administrative records correlate with individual-level hostility on Twitter.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Misinformation and harmful language are interconnected, rather than distinct, challenges.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Prevailing theories of partisan incivility on social media suggest that it derives from disagreement about political issues or from status competition between groups. This study-which analyzes the commenting behavior of Reddit users across diverse cultural contexts (subreddits)-tests the alternative hypothesis that such incivility derives in large part from a selection effect: Toxic people are especially likely to opt into discourse in partisan contexts. First, we examined commenting behavior across over 9,000 unique cultural contexts (subreddits) and confirmed that discourse is indeed more toxic in partisan (e.g.
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Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.