Unifying Models of Intergroup Hostility in Online Discourse
Researchers unify six theories of intergroup hostility using 2.86 million TikTok, Truth Social, and Twitter/X posts, finding boundary and threat construction anchor rhetoric.
The study models mechanisms from six foundational theories of intergroup hostility - boundary construction, threat construction, scapegoating, negative evaluation, dehumanization, and action orientation - within a common empirical framework using 2.86 million posts from TikTok, Truth Social, and Twitter/X during the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Structurally, boundary and threat construction anchor the system; temporally, boundary construction, derogation, and action orientation appear early, dehumanization and threat construction later, and scapegoating last. The work aims to give computational social science a unified empirical basis for modeling hostile rhetoric beyond single-label detection.