One City, Two Comment Sections: Toxicity and Identity on Sadiq Khan's and Zac Goldsmith's Facebook Pages, 2016

The 2016 London mayoral election was contested by Sadiq Khan, who became the city's first Muslim mayor, and Zac Goldsmith. Religion and extremism became themes of the campaign. I compare the comment sections of the two candidates' Facebook pages from January to mid-April 2016: 36,087 comments on 701 posts, after removing duplicates. Every comment was scored with an open toxicity classifier. The two comment sections were similarly toxic, at about 8%. Goldsmith's posts drew a median of 75 comments each against 13 on Khan's, from a more concentrated crowd. Comments the classifier labelled as identity attacks were rare on both pages, but more than twice as common on Khan's (0.55% against 0.23%). An AI-assisted reading of all 128 such comments, not yet checked by a second coder, suggests that only about half were hostile attacks on an identity group; many were people objecting to racism or comments not about identity at all. On that reading, comments hostile to Muslims or Islam numbered 25 on Khan's page and 15 on Goldsmith's. Among comments that mentioned Muslims or Islam, a quarter on Khan's page were toxic, against a sixth on Goldsmith's; comments mentioning Jewish people showed no clear difference. The 593 people who commented on both pages were similarly toxic on each. Overall toxicity rates can hide differences in the kind of hostility on a page, and automated identity-attack labels need to be read before they are counted. The files include the preprint and aggregate results. No comment text or commenter codes are shared.