The mean tweets are coming from inside the House? Twitter incivility up among US politicians, study says

A 2019 tweet by Hern (pic, talking) – which said another politician was ‘endorsing infanticide & proudly doing it!’ – got a high incivility score of 47.6. New research has found that the level of incivility in tweets by members of US Congress increased by 23% between 2009 and 2019. — Getty Images/TNS

It’s not your imagination. Political discourse on Twitter really has grown meaner in recent years, according to a new study.

The research, published April 28 in the journal Social Psychological And Personality Science, found that the level of incivility in tweets by members of US Congress increased by 23% between 2009 and 2019 – a change the study’s authors attribute in part to how Twitter’s “like” and “retweet” buttons reinforce the spread of toxic content.