Social media is often accused of turning political debates into toxic battlegrounds, but new research provides evidence that offline social inequalities actually play a role in shaping this digital aggression. The findings suggest that users from less democratic and economically unequal countries perceive significantly more political hostility online than users from more egalitarian countries. This study nature human behavior.
When the Internet first emerged, many observers expected it to create a more equal and inclusive public sphere. This optimism extended to authoritarian regimes, with early social media platforms sometimes seen as tools for democratic uprisings. But today, political discussion on social media is widely seen as aggressive and hostile.
People tend to blame technology itself for this change. They point to the anonymity of the internet and how social media algorithms reward angry and divisive content. While platform features play a role, the researchers wanted to know whether the broader socio-economic and political environment also shapes online behavior.
Previous research provides evidence that offline inequalities tend to generate social conflict. When there is extreme economic or political disparity in a society, people often face intense competition to improve or protect their social status. This competition can increase a psychological trait known as status motivation.
The status motive is the urge to gain power, wealth, or prestige, sometimes through control, fear, or intimidation. People who are highly motivated by status-seeking tend to be more aggressive in general. Previous research linking status seeking and online hostility has focused primarily on a few Western countries.
Alexander Ball, a researcher at the Institute for Democracy at Central European University, noticed this geographical gap in the scientific literature. He and his colleagues decided to look outside the Western world to understand how digital hostilities work on a global scale.
“We have been studying the topic of online political rivalry for several years,” Bo said. “Our initial research, which focused on the United States and Denmark, led to the surprising conclusion that the same people are hostile in online and offline political discussions.”
Bo noted that the scope of research needs to be expanded to see if these patterns hold true around the world. “However, our theory suggests that similar mechanisms may be at work, and there is little research on online hostility from the Global South,” Bo said. “So we decided to test our hypothesis in a large sample of 30 very different countries.”
To explore these ideas, researchers launched an observational study involving 15,202 participants from these 30 countries. These countries span six continents and were chosen because they offer a variety of political systems and economic realities. The researchers used quota sampling to recruit participants from each country.
Quota sampling is a statistical method that balances the people selected for research to reflect the broader population in terms of age, gender, and education. Participants completed an online survey asking about their experiences with political discussion over the past 30 days. This study defines political discussion as any conversation about social issues, including regional issues, national politics, and international conflicts.
Researchers measured online political victimization by asking participants how often they viewed content that ridiculed, abused, humiliated, or harassed people like them. To measure the perpetration of hostile acts, the researchers asked participants how often they had personally engaged in the same aggressive behavior. They asked questions about these behaviors in both online settings and face-to-face offline interactions.
The study also included a special questionnaire to measure status-driven risk-taking. This survey identifies individuals who are willing to take extreme personal risks just to gain money, power, or fame. The researchers found that experiences of online political hostility vary systematically and strongly across countries.
Specifically, people living in less democratic countries report a significant increase in online hostility. The study used a well-established index called the Liberal-Democracy Index to rank countries by political freedom. Countries with low scores on this index had significantly higher rates of self-reported online victimization.
A similar pattern was found for economic inequality across the countries surveyed. The researchers used the Gini coefficient, a standard statistical measure of income distribution within a country. People living in countries with high economic inequality experienced more online political hostility than people living in more egalitarian societies.
The United States provides an interesting benchmark for these economic findings. “We hear a lot about the problem of online political hostility in the United States, but our data shows that the United States is a fairly typical economically unequal country,” Bo said.
Survey responses also provided evidence about the psychological roots of this hostility. Researchers found that in all 30 countries, people who behaved in a hostile manner online also behaved in a hostile manner offline in face-to-face conversations. This suggests that digital attacks are not simply a product of the anonymity of the internet or the platform’s algorithms.
“Most people think there’s something about the Internet that brings out the worst in people,” Bo says. “But our research shows that for some people, those with a strong desire for status, the Internet is just one potentially hostile realm.”
The researchers found that these status-oriented individuals are more prevalent in less democratic countries. This concentration of status seekers may help explain why overall levels of digital hostility are higher in less democratic societies.
The authors also analyzed demographic factors to see which groups were driving this behavior. They found that young people consistently remain the most hostile group in online political discussions around the world. Because less democratic countries often have younger populations, this demographic reality also contributes to the higher average levels of hostility observed in these countries.
To ensure the survey tool was accurate, the researchers conducted a series of follow-up experiments with 4,294 participants in the United States. One experiment used a virtual dice rolling game to test social desirability bias. Social desirability bias is the tendency of survey respondents to answer questions in a way that makes them look good, such as hiding their bad behavior.
The dice game provided evidence that participants answered honestly about hostile behavior. Another follow-up experiment tested whether frequent exposure to online hostility makes people desensitized to it. Researchers showed participants a series of highly offensive social media posts and then asked them about their experiences in general.
They found no evidence that this repeated exposure caused people to underreport their own victimization. The third experiment tested whether hearing stories about online hostility affected the amount of hostility people reported experiencing. The researchers found that reading statements about high levels of Internet toxicity slightly increased self-reported feelings of victimization.
However, this suggests that major international surveys may underestimate the actual extent of hostility. This gave the researchers confidence that their findings were mathematically sound. Although this study provides a detailed overall snapshot, there are limitations that should be noted.
The data is observational, captures a specific moment in time, and cannot definitively prove cause and effect. It remains possible that this relationship works both ways. Highly hostile online environments can actually exacerbate offline inequalities and weaken democratic institutions.
Another limitation is our reliance on self-reported survey data rather than digital tracking. “We study self-reporting using survey questions, rather than actual behavior on the Internet,” Bo said. “We think this is the best way to compare countries, but certainly we are talking about subjective perceptions and objective hostility.”
This means that rather than analyzing computer logs of people’s exact words, the researchers measured how people felt they were treated or how they remembered their performance. Automated behavioral data from social media platforms provides additional evidence. But algorithms designed to detect hostility are still not reliable across dozens of different languages and cultural backgrounds.
The authors suggest that future studies should track these trends using longitudinal data. Longitudinal studies follow the same group of people over many years and help determine whether changes in the offline environment directly cause changes in online behavior.
Bo is taking his research in a slightly different direction. “I’m currently preparing to do a large five-year project on another topic: how our moral intuitions underlie our support for democracy,” Bo said.
Still, the authors hope their study will encourage other scientists to broaden their geographic focus. “Our study is a stark reminder that we should focus more on the Global South when studying problematic Internet behaviors,” Bo said.
Interestingly, public perceptions of social media reflect these complex dynamics. Researchers found that people in democracies tend to view social media primarily as a source of social disorder. People in less democratic countries are more likely to view social media as a means of liberation and free expression, even though they experience more hostility on social media.
These different perspectives suggest that efforts to fix social media cannot rely on a one-size-fits-all approach. While platform regulation may help limit immediate harm, our findings show that digital hostilities are deeply intertwined with broader social struggles. Reducing online aggression may require addressing the offline political and economic inequalities that drive status competition in the first place.
The study, “Social media users experience more political hostility in economically unequal and less democratic societies,” was authored by Alexander Bor, Antoine Marie, Lea Pradella, and Michael Bang Petersen.
