Who vents on social media? Dark personality, defensive identities and emotions as factors for active political online behaviour and polarization

Concerns over the impact of new digital media on democracies have grown in the recent years. More often than not, social media is labeled as a polarizing if not toxic environment, which can spur offline political action and mobilization for extreme views and parties. To a great extent, constant conflicts and personal attacks are responsible for the heated online climate. Little understood are the reasons why and what kind of people vent on social media. The most wide-spread explanation is that these personalities lack empathy and troll people online for pure fun. Studies rarely consider other, non-personality, factors of this behavior, such as social environment and living conditions of the people active on social media, including stress, social isolation and other hardships. Another possible explanation is strong political and exclusive national identities, also known to raise levels of affective polarization in the country, and thus making people react aggressively to opponents, especially in the anonymous internet space where even uncivil behavior seemingly goes unpunished. Similarly, little attention is paid to the interactive aspect of online political discussions and the probability that people just feel threatened by the attacks on their views and therefore respond to online provocations. ValCon, a representative survey in six European countries (Germany, Spain, Italy, France, Poland and Ireland), conducted in May 2021, measures the impact of these different influences on social media use and behavior. Combining a short “dark personality” scale, respondents’ feelings towards politics, social discontent, strength of partisanship and national identity as well as a rich battery of social media use and behavior, we will explore explanatory factors of involvement in social media more generally and participation in discussions and disagreements more specifically, as well as measure their impact on political polarization.