Differentiation drives the erosion of positivity on social media

We live in a digital age, where billions of people engage in dialogue within topic-bound communities and threads. In an archival analysis of over 2 billion Reddit comments and an experiment, we show that this dialogue becomes more negative over time. Further analyses suggest that negativity rises over time because social media users seek to make unique comments on the same topic, and it is easier to differentiate oneself through negative comments than through positive comments. As threads and communities evolve, and it becomes more difficult to make unique observations, users turn to negativity. Our studies show how basic human motives interact with the structure of social media platforms, posing an acute challenge for sustaining healthy online dialogue.

Abstract

Most people believe that social media discourse is negative and divisive. Here we show how this negativity can evolve even when users are not motivated to be negative. We propose that social media users seek to differentiate themselves from other users, and it is easier to differentiate oneself through negativity than positivity because negative information is more heterogeneous and counternormative than positive information. This makes users increasingly likely to post negative comments as a conversation unfolds and it becomes more challenging to make unique contributions. Analyzing 2.05 billion comments from 2,150 Reddit communities shows that comments become more negative over time, both within threads and community histories. This trend toward negativity is mediated by the semantic uniqueness of comments, suggesting that it arises from users differentiating themselves. This trend is strongest when initial dialogue is positive, making negative comments highly counternormative. We replicate these patterns in an experiment simulating social media dialogue (_n_ = 3,685). Participants become more negative over time, but only when incentivized to be unique, and especially when dialogue begins positively. These findings suggest that the structure of social media platforms interacts with human motivation to foster a drift toward negativity over time in online discourse.

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Data, Materials, and Software Availability

Analysis scripts and data are available at https://osf.io/68wvm/ (27). Data and code may not be used for commercial purposes. The detoxify classifier is available at https://github.com/unitaryai/detoxify (42), and the sentence transformer used to generate embeddings is available at https://huggingface.co/sentence-transformers/all-MiniLM-L6-v2 (43).

Acknowledgments

Author contributions

H.M., Y.C.L., A.K., and J.C.J. designed research; H.M., Y.J., and J.C.J. performed research; H.M., Y.J., and J.C.J. analyzed data; and H.M., Y.C.L., A.K., W.J.B., and J.C.J. wrote the paper.

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interest.

Supporting Information

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References

G. Fariello, D. Jemielniak, A. Sulkowski, Does Godwin’s law (rule of Nazi analogies) apply in observable reality? An empirical study of selected words in 199 million Reddit posts _New Media Soc._**26**, 389–404 (2024).