{"ID":2888988,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21418","arxiv_id":"2507.21418","title":"How Growing Toxicity Manifests: A Topic Trajectory Analysis of U.S. Immigration Discourse on Social Media","abstract":"In the online public sphere, discussions about immigration often become increasingly fractious, marked by toxic language and polarization. Drawing on 4 million X posts over six months, we combine a user- and topic-centric approach to study how shifts in toxicity manifest as topical shifts. Our topic discovery method, which leverages instruction-based embeddings and recursive HDBSCAN, uncovers 157 fine-grained subtopics within the U.S. immigration discourse. We focus on users in four groups: (1) those with increasing toxicity, (2) those with decreasing toxicity, and two reference groups with no significant toxicity trend but matched toxicity levels. Treating each posting history as a trajectory through a five-dimensional topic space, we compare average group trajectories using permutational MANOVA. Our findings show that users with increasing toxicity drift toward alarmist, fear-based frames, whereas those with decreasing toxicity pivot toward legal and policy-focused themes. Both patterns diverge statistically significantly from their reference groups. This pipeline, which combines hierarchical topic discovery with trajectory analysis, offers a replicable method for studying dynamic conversations around social issues at scale.","short_abstract":"In the online public sphere, discussions about immigration often become increasingly fractious, marked by toxic language and polarization. Drawing on 4 million X posts over six months, we combine a user- and topic-centric approach to study how shifts in toxicity manifest as topical shifts. Our topic discovery method, w...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21418","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.21418v1","authors":"[\"Una Joh\",\"Yiqi Li\",\"Jeff Hemsley\"]","published":"2025-07-29T01:02:20Z","proceeding":"cs.SI","tasks":"[\"cs.SI\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}