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

This paper analyzes the impact of social media use on gender equality attitudes in Europe, utilizing a novel survey dataset on social media use and value orientations from six European countries (France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Spain) in 2021. Combining the research on societal conflicts, gender equality and social media use, we make anoriginal contribution by showing that intense use of social media shapes anti-gender equality attitudes. We use a unique set of gender equality items in the survey: gender equality on the labor market, same rights for LGBT persons, and whether feminists hate men. Linear regressions are used to examine the associations between three distinct operationalizations of gender attitudes, with our central independent variable (the general use and intensity of usage of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram) as well as socio-economic controls. We demonstrate that a high intensity of social media use is significantly associated with more regressive attitudes toward gender equality on all three items. We apply manifold sensitivity checks and demonstrate that our results remain robust against various model specifications. Our work has important implications for the role of social media in shaping value orientations, and the contested nature of gender equality in established democracies.