Cross-Country Effect of Social Media Use on Ethnocentrism

Ethnocentrism, a facet of in-group favorability, is seen as associating oneself with people of the same culture, language, and history. Past research has shed light on how ethnocentrism fits in modern Western democracies, where immigration has been steadfastly increasing and becoming a more salient issue in the media. But surprisingly little emphasis has been placed on how the technological affordances of social media, as well as an unprecedented level of access to information and communication, affect attitudes towards foreigners and refugees. Using data from three Western democracies – the United States, the United Kingdom, and France – we demonstrate that loyalty towards one's own ethnic group remains a salient issue at the individual level. Holding several significant demographic predictors constant, the usage of social media or the exposure to cross-cutting political opinions or information, per se, do not correlate with the attitudes towards other ethnic groups, although Twitter use does facilitate a decrease in ethnocentrism. Both online and offline political talk with people of different ethnicity or race are significant predictors of a decrease in ethnocentric attitudes. Facebook use (in the U.S. and the U.K.) and the exposure to cross-cutting information on Facebook (in all three countries) correlated with a higher level of ethnocentrism. Twitter use, on the other hand, demonstrated more promising results in that it correlated with a decrease in hard ethnocentrism – a result most likely driven by the U.K.