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Right-Wing Social Media and Political Unrest

Does right-wing social media use increase right-wing demonstrations and violence? We create a spatial panel dataset measuring 57,505 right-wing social media posts and 1,765 incidents of right- wing unrest in all United States counties from January 2020 through January 2021. Using spatial regression analysis with county and month fixed effects, we find that county-level right-wing social media activity in a given month increased the frequency of subsequent right-wing unrest events. Additional analyses using matching, entropy balancing, and fixed-effects instrumental variable methods that account for observable and unobservable confounders have consistent findings, and offer steps towards causal interpretation. A semi-supervised computational analysis of five million right-wing social media comments from January 2020 through January 2021 provides insight into the mechanisms connecting right-wing social media activity to right-wing contentious events. Our study advances research on social media activity and offline political protest by illuminating countrywide patterns of localized instances of unrest. In addition, it helps develop an emerging research agenda on social media and overt violence.