Gender trouble through social media? When gender equality is opposed (and when it isn’t)

Contemporary democratic societies face a substantial cultural backlash. In particular gender equality is contested and provokes political and social conflicts. However, previous studies on polarization hardly considered gender equality issues in greater detail. Moreover, it is intensely debated whether and to what extent social media contributes to value conflicts. Combining the research on polarization, gender equality and social media use, we make an original contribution by arguing that the use of social media may in fact contribute to more pronounced anti-gender equality attitudes. We substantiate our argument by analyzing an original survey data set on social media use and value orientations from six European countries (France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Spain) in 2021, focusing on three different gender equality items: gender equality on the labor market, same rights for LGBT persons, and whether feminists hate men. Firstly, we use standard OLS regression to examine the associations between the three items, the central independent variables (the use of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram) and socioeconomic controls. Our results indicate that a high intensity of social media use is significantly associated with more regressive attitudes toward gender equality. To account for possible sample selectivity and reverse causality we apply a range of sensitivity checks and demonstrate that our results remain robust against various different model specifications. Hence, our results show that an intense use of social media amplifies regressive views on gender equality. Our work has implications for the research on value conflicts in European societies, the role of social media for shaping value orientations and the contested nature of gender gender equality issues.