Do Sanctioning and Monitoring Reduce Political Candidates’ Online Toxicity?

• In Event: Online Hate, Toxicity, Intolerant Discourse, and Its Political Effects

Abstract

Among electoral candidates, toxic speech can swamp out constructive political debate and exacerbate polarization. We conduct a field experiment among candidates for the 2022 U.S. general election to assess whether Twitter-based co-partisan sanctioning and email-based monitoring by researchers can reduce online toxicity. We find that candidates do not reduce their toxicity in response to in-group sanctioning. In fact, we find some evidence of a boomerang effect: in certain models, sanctioned candidates appear to become about 10% more likely to post a toxic tweet in the week following. We also find a small but statistically significant effect of monitoring on mitigating online toxicity among electoral candidates. At the same time, we find no evidence that monitoring results in a chilling effect. Our findings suggest that making candidates aware of monitoring has the potential to reduce toxicity in political campaigns without reducing interaction between candidates and their voters.

Authors

• Daniel Pemstein, North Dakota State University

• Brigitte Seim, University of Minnesota

• Valeriya Mechkova, Varieties of Democracy, Gothenburg University

• Yunus E Orhan, North Dakota State University

• Steven Lloyd Wilson, University of Nevada, Reno