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People often comment that Brexit and the US presidential election have proved so divisive that it feels as if smart and civil political debate has taken a hit. Now a study looking at the quality of discourse in online political discussion groups over the last 10 years shows that conversations have indeed become both less sophisticated and more offensive than ever.

In the US, critics have drawn attention to what they call the 鈥淭rump effect鈥�: a shift in norms since Donald Trump became a serious presidential candidate. But these accounts are mostly anecdotal. Rishab Nithyanand at Data & Society, a research institute in New York, and his colleagues at the University of Massachusetts wanted to see if they could find evidence that discourse had worsened.

They looked at Reddit, a聽social network built around discussion groups with specific topics, known as subreddits. More than 230 million people use the site each month, making it the fourth most visited in the US.

Reddit is particularly useful for finding out what people really think, says Nithyanand. Compared with Twitter, which only lets you post very short messages, Reddit supports longer and more complex discussions. And unlike Facebook, it does not require you to disclose your identity.

Grade school language

The team analysed 3.5 billion comments posted by 25.3 million people between 2007 and 2017. They sorted the comments into two groups: one non-political, the other comprised of things posted to politics subreddits, including mainstream groups such as SandersForPresident and The_Donald, where Trump participated in an official discussion. Noting the frequency of offensive words and phrases gave a measure of how civil the discussions were.

The non-political comments were fairly civil, but the political comments were a different story. People were 35聽per cent more likely on average to use offensive language in political than nonpolitical discussions. Political discourse was more offensive between May 2016 and May 2017 than in any other 12-month period in Reddit鈥檚 history.

To analyse the complexity of the comments, the researchers used the Flesch-Kincaid readability test, which ranks language use on聽a US grade-school scale. They found that discourse in political groups had dropped on average .

What accounts for the changes? Nithyanand and his colleagues identified a large influx of new users to Reddit鈥檚 political groups, which may have lowered the average level of linguistic complexity. Also, there were many users who had previously been active only in extremist groups, who now posted regularly聽in mainstream groups.聽Such users can take control of the tone or direction of聽conversations.

Partisan garbage fire

Another growing group of Reddit users is likely to be bots聽鈥� accounts that post automatically. Nithyanand is now looking into the exact role bots may have played in lowering the quality of discourse and hopes to have results early next year. 鈥淚 wouldn鈥檛 be surprised if bots were involved,鈥� says Julio Amador Diaz Lopez at Imperial College London鈥檚 Business School. Plenty of recent evidence suggests they played a role 聽and the Trump election.聽鈥淒uring Brexit, they just retweeted things in favour of the Leave camp,鈥� he says. 鈥淚n the US election, it was a full blown propaganda campaign, which excited people and fuelled a partisan garbage fire.鈥�

Nithyanad is careful to point out that you cannot show that Trump is to blame for any of this, however. It鈥檚 what the 鈥淭rump effect鈥� implies but you can only ever show a correlation, he says.

Still, the timing is suggestive. 鈥淭he study shows a strong correlation between Trump鈥檚 rise in popularity and an increase in offensiveness,鈥� he says. 鈥淓lite politicians have a responsibility to remain more civil, because people mimic their behaviour.鈥�

However, there are easier changes that could help lift the discourse. First,聽Lopez thinks we should block fake or offensive material on social media automatically, just as we block spam emails. He is developing machine learning software to detect tweets that spread fake news, for example.

Ultimately, Lopez thinks it falls to governments to protect their democracies. There are laws regulating political ads on TV, for example. And in the UK, broadcasters and newspapers are not allowed to cover politics on polling days in case they influence the election results. Lopez wants social media companies to be held to similar standards. 鈥淭here should be a bit more government intervention given the high stakes,鈥� he says.

Reference:听