The Relationship between Incivility and Negative Emotions in Conversations about Immigrants on Reddit

Abstract

Being characterized by a strong participatory culture, social media have revolutionized the way people communicate and exchange information, fostering important debates, acting as an extension of everyday talk between individuals and emerging as a new space for socialization. Conversations about health, entertainment, sports, politics, and more are actively held, offering insight into how online communities communicate and interact around various themes. Through this ongoing dialogue, online social media communities reveal how users negotiate differences and build collective narratives, making these digital platforms a vital ground for analysing contemporary discourse. This becomes increasingly important knowing how negative, prejudiced and toxic discourse can propagate online and how it affects not only users but society at large. In this article, we examine debates on immigration in Portugal and Europe on Reddit, focusing on sentiment, emotion, and the level of incivility in this context. Analysing a database of 2,167 posts and comments on a Portuguese-language subreddit, we adopt a mixed-methods approach to explore how emotions are linked to incivility towards immigration and immigrants, especially from Brazil. Patterns of incivility and negative emotions are identified, revealing a high frequency of communication norm violations accompanied by feelings of anger in discussions about immigration. We found considerable overlaps between negative emotions, particularly anger, and breaches of the contextual norm and the relational norm, whereas emotions like sadness, fear, and even pleasure only seldom seem to be indicative of the presence of incivility. Overall, our analysis illustrates how different emotions affect the maintenance or breach of communication norms in online interactions. This article not only contributes to the scientific literature on online behaviour in Portuguese-speaking environments but also informs policymakers and online platform moderators on strategies to manage and mitigate incivility in virtual debates, particularly by understanding the role emotions play in fostering or curbing disrespectful discourse.