This study assesses whether references to the ancient past in debates about political issues on social media over-represent negative and extreme views. Using precision-recall, we test the performance of three sentiment analysis methods (VADER, TextBlob and Flair Sentiment) on a corpus of 1,478,483 posts, comments and replies published on Brexit-themed Facebook pages between 2015 and 2017. Drawing on the results of VADER and manual coding, we demonstrate that: 1) texts not containing keywords relating to the Iron Age, Roman and medieval (IARM) past are mostly neutral and 2) texts with IARM keywords express more negative and extreme sentiment than those without keywords. Our findings show that mentions of the ancient past in political discourse on multi-sided issues on social media are likely to indicate the presence of hostile and polarised opinions.

Political posts on social media that most frequently referenced ancient history tended to be more extreme, hostile and overwhelmingly negative in tone than average, finds a new study by researchers from UCL and the University of Edinburgh.

For centuries, the past has been leveraged as a powerful means of framing and legitimising political identities .

Today, such identities are often expressed on social media. However, most of the existing literature on political uses of the past online has analysed populist nationalist and Far-Right speech .

Very few studies have examined how references to the past feature in multi-sided discussions about a specific political issue.

Therefore, although substantial knowledge outlines how different ‘myths’ and heritage symbols are invoked to support extreme ideologies in online environments, there is virtually no information on whether people with more moderate views similarly mobilise the past to make sense of the present and plan for the future.

Conclusion

This study demonstrates that posts that reference the ancient past in political discourse on social media are significantly more negative and more extremely polarised than those that do not contain these references.

We therefore conclude that heritage keywords in politically-themed debates on social media are likely to signal the presence of more polarised and, potentially, extremist views.

Furthermore, we show that social media research on political uses of the past is likely to over-represent people with very strong opinions compared to individuals whose views are more moderate.