Trolling and insulting others on social media in Spain: the role of social media news use, culture of impunity, and social media envy

ABSTRACT

Prior research has delved into the diverse effects that social media news consumption has over broader social media interaction patterns. From social ties curation, to ties filtering, blocking, and other behaviors, social media news consumption has been empirically deemed to influence the way citizens socialize in these virtual spaces. Drawing on a diverse and nationally representative two wave-panel data from Spain, this study builds on this strand of the literature by investigating the role of social media news, social media culture of impunity and social media envy or feelings of jealousy, and resentment toward others, over trolling and insulting people in social media. Results show that social media news has a direct association with malicious trolling but does not fuel abusive verbal interactions. The latter is mainly explained by individuals who embrace a culture of impunity – the expectation that in social media one may commit a crime or violation and not be held accountable–, and social media envy. Furthermore, there is a positive divergent interaction between social media envy and culture of impunity on insulting other citizens. That is, people who report higher levels of social media envy and culture of impunity tend to engage in insulting others the most in social media.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media news
• social media culture of impunity
• social media envy
• social media trolling
• insulting others in social media

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2024.2348150

Notes

1. Insults are dysphemistic expressions that entail words or phrases directed toward a specific target “with connotations that are offensive either about the denotatum and/or to people addressed or overhearing the utterance” (Allan & Burridge, 2006, p. 31).

2. As the association between variables may also be concurrent, we conducted a series of cross-sectional analyses. The findings generally align with those reported in the following section, both in terms of the direction of the coefficients and their significance. Furthermore, some associations were even reinforced. For instance, the associations between social media news use and insulting others (β = .031, p = .044), and perceived social media impunity and trolling behavior (β = .145, p = .000), were found to be statistically significant. Additionally, as a robustness check, we ran six additional regression models (one for each independent variable), presented in Tables A2 to A7. All associations that were statistically significant and non-significant in the main analysis remained significant in these additional models, except for the association between social media culture of impunity and trolling. In the main analysis, this association was not statistically significant, but in the independent regression, it was (see Table A2). Likewise, having one estimate significant and the other not for each DV does not mean that the difference between both is significant (Gelman & Stern, 2006). Accordingly, we implemented a z-score test to check if the difference between beta values for social media impunity differ for trolling (B = 0.040) and insulting (B = 0.068). The follow-up robustness check analysis showed that the difference is not statistically significant, Z = 0.65, p = .51.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Manuel Goyanes

Manuel Goyanes serves as Associate Professor of Research Methods at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. His interdisciplinary work revolves around theoretically designing, and empirically testing, cutting-edge quantitative and qualitative methodological procedures to scientifically address challenging aspects of social science inquiry.

Isabel Inguanzo

Dr. Isabel Inguanzo is a sociologist and holds a PhD in political science. She is an Associate Professor at Universidad de Salamanca. Prior to that she was assistant professor at Universidad Loyola Andalucía (2016-2020), and worked at the UNESCO Regional Office for the Pacific States in Samoa (2014-2015), coordinating the Social and Human Sciences department. Her research is primarily on Activism, Ethnic minorities and Gender. She has also work as a consultant for the European Parliament Subcommittee on Human Rights (2017-2020).

Homero Gil de Zúñiga

Homero Gil de Zúñiga, Ph.D. in Politics at Universidad Europea de Madrid and Ph.D. in Mass Communication at University of Wisconsin – Madison, Prof. Gil de Zúñiga is Distinguished Research Professor at University of Salamanca where he serves as director of the Democracy Research Unit (DRU), Distinguished Professor of Media Effects & AI at The Pennsylvania State University, and Senior Research Fellow at Universidad Diego Portales, Chile. In general, his work draws from theoretically driven research, aiming to shed an empirical social scientific light over how social media, algorithms, AI, and other technologies affect society and democracy.