Generalizability of hostile-rhetoric organization across contexts

Determine whether the statistical organization of group-directed hostile-rhetoric mechanisms identified in TikTok, Truth Social, and Twitter/X posts during the 2024 U.S. presidential election also appears in other political contexts, on other platforms, in other languages, or in other forms of group-directed hostility.

Background

The study analyzes six linguistic mechanisms of group-directed hostile rhetoric—boundary construction, threat construction, scapegoating, negative evaluation, dehumanization, and action orientation—in a corpus drawn from TikTok, Truth Social, and Twitter/X during the 2024 U.S. presidential election. It finds a sparse structural organization centered on boundary construction and threat construction, alongside a recurring temporal ordering across narratives.

The authors explicitly limit the generality of this finding because the corpus covers a specific political event, set of platforms, language context, and forms of hostility. Whether the same organization generalizes beyond these settings is therefore left unresolved.