Rage Within the Machine: Activation of Racist Content in Social Media

• In Event: Racism and Political Attitudes in Latin America

Abstract

In social media networks, users engage and selectively propagate cognitively congruent frames. Racist content is among the frames users are exposed to. Unlike other frames, racist discourse is socially punished. In other words, racist discourse is a socially costly behavior among a menu of other less socially costly options. As such, people are unlikely to engage without a trigger. When will racist frames--a socially costly behavior--activate in social media networks? In this paper, I argue that social media users will engage with racist content when the status of the in-group is threatened. When the out-group threatens the status of the in-group, users will select frames that serve as markers to more starkly separate the in-group identity from the out-group. Racialized frames serve as these markers, and the threat to the in-group status makes racist content cognitively congruent. I provide evidence of this behavior by examining Twitter activity during the indigena protests in Ecuador in October 2019. I use a novel multi-step machine-learning process to detect racist tweets and show that pro-government users more actively engage when their status is threatened by pro-indigena users.

Author

• Sebastian Vallejo Vera, Tecnologico de Monterrey