Economic inequality increases race salience in 6 million Tweets

Economic inequality brings multiple adverse consequences. These range from decreased trust in government, increased drug abuse and violence, and decreased societal cohesion. If and how economic inequality impacts online behaviors has received less attention. Here, we use a corpus of 6 million race tweets posted between 2012 and 2018 to determine the frequency and sentiment of tweets containing ethnic epithets and slurs across all 52 US states. Informed by Integrated Threat Theory, we tested whether inequality increased the use of slurs on social media for the purpose of denigrating other ethnic groups. Consistent with this, we found that states with greater inequality predicted increased use of racial epithets used to denigrate other groups. However, we also found that more unequal locales were positively correlated with increased use of ethnic words used in a positive way (potentially toward other ingroup members). As such, while inequality is correlated with more prejudicial behavior on social media, it may also increase the salience of ethnic group identity more broadly. Implications and future directions are discussed.