Recent events have shown how uncivil communication by political elites on social media can spread through networked publics and contribute to real-world disruption. To explain the upstream dynamics of these processes, this book introduces the Spiral of Political Incivility on Social Media (SPIN), a model that conceptualizes incivility as a dynamic, three-stage process: the production of norm violations by political actors, their perception shaped by platform affordances and national contexts, and user reactions that may reinforce or dampen the original cues.

Drawing on a most-different-systems design, the study combines computational text analysis of 37,152 campaign posts across Facebook, Twitter, and Telegram in Brazil, Spain, and the United States, representative surveys (N = 2,337), and an analysis of 13.6 million user comments. The findings reveal three ideal-typical trajectoriesreinforcing, reactive, and dampened spiralsdemonstrating that political incivility online is not random noise but a context-dependent process shaped by the interaction of actors, platforms, and users. By identifying where these spirals accelerate or stall, the study highlights key leverage points for mitigating the diffusion of incivility in digital democracies.

Autorentext

Dr. K. Pamina Syed Ali is a communication scientist specializing in political communication, AI, and digital platforms. She applies data-driven methods to understand how politics and media intersect in the digital age. She holds a PhD from the University of Zurich.

Inhalt

1. PART I: Tracing the Spiral From Norms to the Dynamics of Political Incivility.- 1. Introduction: Norms and the Crisis of Civility.- PART II: Political Incivility in the Digital Campaign Age Framing the Theoretical Terrain.- 2. Why Political Incivility? Democratic Stakes in a Fragmented, Digital Public Sphere.- PART III: Unveiling the Dynamic Patterns of Political Online Incivility.- 3. Introduction to the Empirical Studies.- PART IV: Spiral Trajectories Empirical Typologies of Norm-Violation Across Platforms and Countries.- 4. The Spiral of Political Incivility on Social Media: A Typological Model of Communicative Trajectories.- PART V: What Now?.- 5. Understanding SPIN.