Are Generics and Negativity about Social Groups Common on Social Media? A Comparative Analysis of Twitter (X) Data

arXiv:2405.08331v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Generics (unquantified generalizations) are thought to be pervasive in communication and when they are about social groups, this may offend and polarize people because generics gloss over variations between individuals. Generics about social groups might be particularly common on Twitter (X). This remains unexplored, however. Using machine learning (ML) techniques, we therefore developed an automatic classifier for social generics, applied it to more than a million tweets about people, and analyzed the tweets. We found …

abstract analysis arxiv communication comparative analysis cs.cy cs.lg cs.si data media people social social media thought twitter type