Our methodology consists of extracting topics from the priority themes of the SM debate, using BERT language processing techniques and TF-IDF model. We believe our approach to reflect a more complex society, differing from the recent literature, which has considered a unique left–right dichotomic cleavage. The novelty of our work resides on analysing several axes of polarizations related to different societal topics. On the other hand, recent studies have begun to look at how these online channels were able to provide a new impulse in human communication. The impact of the social media (SM) has been seen on the one hand as the cause of large exacerbation of negative messages, responsible for massively harmful societal phenomenon against democracies. provide a conceptual framework that integrates scientific knowledge about cognitive–motivational mechanisms that influence political polarization and the social-communicative contexts in which they are enacted. Democracy is at risk when citizens become so polarized that an ‘us versus them’ mentality dominates. We conclude with a discussion of unanswered questions and ways in which our framework can be extended to the study of culture and institutions. These cognitive–motivational mechanisms interact with social influence processes linked to communication source, message and channel factors, all of which might contribute to increased or decreased polarization. Whereas conservative-rightist ideology is associated with valuing tradition, social order and maintenance of the status quo, liberal-leftist ideology is associated with a push for egalitarian social change. However, a distinct class of system-justifying motives contributes to asymmetric forms of polarization. Ego-justifying and group-justifying motives lead individuals to defend their own pre-existing beliefs and those of their in-group, respectively. In this Review, we provide a conceptual framework to integrate scientific knowledge about cognitive–motivational mechanisms that influence political polarization and the social-communicative contexts in which they are enacted. Despite a vast multidisciplinary literature, no coherent conceptual framework of the microlevel dynamics that increase or decrease polarization has been presented. Healthy democratic polities feature competing visions of a good society but also require some level of cooperation and institutional trust. In sum, out-group language is the strongest predictor of social media engagement across all relevant predictors measured, suggesting that social media may be creating perverse incentives for content expressing out-group animosity. This out-group effect was not moderated by political orientation or social media platform, but stronger effects were found among political leaders than among news media accounts. Language about the out-group was a very strong predictor of “angry” reactions (the most popular reactions across all datasets), and language about the in-group was a strong predictor of “love” reactions, reflecting in-group favoritism and out-group derogation.
![trumps cult animosity shows up trumps cult animosity shows up](https://bluevirginia.us/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/mortonlarock.jpg)
Out-group language consistently emerged as the strongest predictor of shares and retweets: the average effect size of out-group language was about 4.8 times as strong as that of negative affect language and about 6.7 times as strong as that of moral-emotional language-both established predictors of social media engagement. Each individual term referring to the political out-group increased the odds of a social media post being shared by 67%. Analyzing posts from news media accounts and US congressional members ( n = 2,730,215), we found that posts about the political out-group were shared or retweeted about twice as often as posts about the in-group. We investigated whether out-group animosity was particularly successful at generating engagement on two of the largest social media platforms: Facebook and Twitter. There has been growing concern about the role social media plays in political polarization.