Affective polarization

Characterizing affective polarization on Twitter and Reddit - how it has evolved over time and which topics incite more polarized responses.

Affective polarization, or the tendency of people to dislike and distrust members of their political opposition, has been rising. However, we do not understand how this manifests on online platforms. Using language models, we have estimated the affective polarization of ~2.5 billion comments on Reddit and Twitter for journalists, politicians, the media, and everday people since the inception of these platforms.