Social media and anti-immigrant prejudice: a multi-method analysis of the role of social media use, threat perceptions, and cognitive ability

The study investigates how social media relates to anti-immigrant emotions through perceived threats and how these relationships vary by cognitive ability in Singapore. Situated within Integrated Threat Theory, the authors address limitations of survey-only and social media-only approaches by combining computational analyses of public discourse with an individual-level survey. Key research questions and hypotheses: - RQ1: What is the primary emotion in discussions about immigrants on social media? - RQ2: What topical themes characterize social media discussions about immigrants? - H1: Informational social media use will be positively associated with negative emotions toward American expatriates, Malays, and Indians. - H2/H3: Symbolic and realistic threat perceptions mediate the relationship between social media use and negative emotions toward these groups. - H4/H5: Cognitive ability moderates these mediated relationships such that effects are stronger among individuals with lower cognitive ability. Context and importance: Singapore has both high immigrant presence and constrained press freedom, making social media a key venue for expressive and informational engagement about immigration. Understanding how social media relates to threat perceptions and affective prejudice informs theory and policy on digital-era attitude formation.

Prior work shows social media as a venue for uninhibited expression, including hate speech, which can polarize opinion and affect perceived social cohesion. Computational analyses have linked anti-immigration discourse to negative emotions and specific moral foundations; political actors’ social media content often frames immigration negatively. Topic modeling and opinion mining studies identify emergent public issues online and can inform policy. Integrated Threat Theory posits symbolic and realistic threats as core predictors of outgroup prejudice. Exposure to anti-immigrant content online can activate such threats, shaping attitudes. While some research notes positive intergroup contact online, other studies link social media use to anti-minority sentiment and offline hate crimes. Individual differences such as cognitive ability affect susceptibility to misinformation and prejudicial attitudes; lower ability is associated with stronger negative affect toward outgroups and greater responsiveness to threatening content. The present study extends this literature by focusing on affective prejudice and testing moderated mediation by cognitive ability.

Design: Multi-method study with two components. Study 1: Computational text analysis of expressive social media use - Data sources: Public posts and comments from popular Singapore-based communities (June–December 2018), including Facebook pages (Straits Times Review, Channel News Asia, Mothership, The Online Citizen, The Straits Times, Independent SG, Stomp, All Singapore Stuff, SMRT, MustShareNews), Reddit (/r/singapore), and HardwareZone (Eat-Drink-Man-Woman forum). - Collection tools: Facebook Graph API via Netvizz; Reddit via PRAW; forums via Python scripts. Initial corpus: 702,607 posts/comments; filtered to English using NLTK, yielding 488,924. - Immigrant-mention identification: Dictionary of 52 immigrant-related terms (e.g., migrant, expat, CECA, PRC, Ang Mo, Pinoy, FDW, and local pejoratives). Final immigrant-mention dataset: 105,539 English posts; 86,462 posts ≥10 characters (avg 13 words; median 11). - Validation: Random sample of 200 posts annotated as true vs. false positives (immigrant self-reports). False-positive rate <1%. - Emotion analysis: Singlish SenticNet lexicon (includes Singaporean slang) and replication with LIWC2015 to derive percentages of positive and negative emotion words. - Topic modeling: DLATK with MALLET LDA tailored for short texts; grid search for parameters; alpha=5 to allow up to five topics per longer posts; 50 topics retained with minimal overlap. Stopwords removed; Singapore-specific terms excluded; pronouns retained. - Analysis: Welch two-sample t-tests comparing emotion levels between immigrant-mention posts and all other posts. Study 2: National online survey of informational social media use and attitudes - Sampling: Qualtrics online panel (February 2020), Singapore citizens; N=1,036. Quotas to approximate population on age and gender. Power analysis targeted >857 for detecting small indirect effects. - Measures: - Negative emotions toward each group (Americans, Malays, Indians): 5 items (contempt, disgust, anger, envy, jealousy), 7-point scale; averaged (α=0.90–0.92 across groups). - Social media informational use: Frequency (1=never to 7=several times/day) of posting, commenting, sharing, reading newsfeed, reading friends’ timelines, searching; averaged (M=3.46, SD=1.57; α=0.89). - Symbolic threat: 3 items (identity, norms/values, culture threatened), 5-point scale; averaged (α=0.92–0.95). - Realistic threat: 4 items (overcrowding, jobs, housing, cleanliness), 5-point scale; averaged (α=0.89–0.95). - Cognitive ability: 8-item WordSum vocabulary test (M=5.27, SD=1.98; α=0.73). - Controls: Age, gender, education, income, race, religion; news use (TV, radio, print); contextual control (COVID-19 threat perception). - Analytic strategy: - OLS hierarchical regressions predicting negative emotions for each outgroup: Block 1 demographics/controls; Block 2 media use; Block 3 symbolic and realistic threats; Block 4 cognitive ability. - Mediation: PROCESS Model 4 with 5,000 bootstrapped samples; parallel mediators (symbolic and realistic threats) between social media use and negative emotions. - Moderated mediation: PROCESS Model 59 with cognitive ability moderating paths through threats; indirect effects probed at −1 SD, mean, +1 SD cognitive ability. - Reliability and descriptive statistics: Reported in Table 4 for main constructs; R-squared changes by blocks reported in Table 5.

Study 1 (expressive social media use) - Emotion comparison (Welch t-tests): Posts mentioning immigrants were significantly less positive and more negative than posts on other topics. - SenticNet: Positive words M=3.8% (SE=5.6) vs. 5.8% (SE=10.3), p<0.001; Negative words M=2.8% (SE=4.4) vs. 2.6% (SE=5.2), p<0.001. - LIWC: Positive words M=3.7% (SE=8.3) vs. 4.1% (SE=11.1), p<0.001; Negative words M=2.2% (SE=5.5) vs. 2.1% (SE=6.9), p<0.001. - Topics: Discourse centered on perceived economic and cultural threats and governance. - Self-reference/ingroup comparisons (≈15.1%); Government/policy (≈12.7%); Jobs/employment (≈11.6%); Economy (≈4.5%); Crime/law (≈6.9%); Security (≈2.3%); Habits/culture (≈4.0%). Study 2 (informational social media use) - H1 supported: Social media informational use positively associated with negative emotions toward all outgroups in OLS models controlling for demographics and other media use. - Americans: β=0.132, p<0.001; Malays: β=0.153, p<0.001; Indians: β=0.122, p<0.001. - TV news use associated with lower negative emotions (β≈−0.10 to −0.15, all p<0.001); radio news use positive (β≈0.13–0.18, p<0.001). - Threat perceptions predict negative emotions (Block 3): - Symbolic threat: Americans β=0.220, Malays β=0.279, Indians β=0.304 (all p<0.001). - Realistic threat: Americans β=0.295, Malays β=0.366, Indians β=0.246 (all p<0.001). - Mediation (PROCESS Model 4): Social media use → higher symbolic and realistic threat → higher negative emotions; indirect effects significant for all groups (H2, H3 supported). - Americans: Indirect total b=0.079 (SE=0.018, 95% CI 0.046–0.117); via symbolic b=0.032 (0.011, 0.013–0.055); via realistic b=0.047 (0.013, 0.025–0.077). Direct b=0.043 (ns). - Malays: Indirect total b=0.105 (0.022, 0.063–0.147); via symbolic b=0.042 (0.013, 0.019–0.070); via realistic b=0.063 (0.016, 0.035–0.096). Direct b=0.030 (ns). - Indians: Indirect total b=0.053 (0.019, 0.018–0.092); via symbolic b=0.034 (0.012, 0.012–0.061); via realistic b=0.019 (0.010, 0.003–0.042). Direct b=0.060 (0.004–0.116). - Cognitive ability effects: - Direct: Higher cognitive ability associated with lower negative emotions (Americans β=−0.091; Malays β=−0.125; Indians β=−0.159; all p<0.001). - Moderated mediation (PROCESS Model 59): Indirect effects through both threats are stronger at low cognitive ability and diminish with higher ability; effects at +1 SD cognitive ability not significant (H4, H5 supported).

Across expressive and informational paradigms, social media is linked to more negative affect toward immigrants, with perceived symbolic and realistic threats as key mechanisms. Study 1 shows that online discourse about immigrants is more negative than baseline discussions and centers on jobs, economy, governance, and cultural habits—aligning with ITT’s threat dimensions. Study 2 demonstrates that informational social media use predicts negative emotions toward Americans, Malays, and Indians, and that this relationship is mediated by threat perceptions. Cognitive ability mitigates these mediated effects: individuals with lower or average cognitive ability show stronger threat-based indirect effects, whereas high cognitive ability attenuates them. These findings underscore social media’s role in shaping affective prejudice in a non-liberal context like Singapore, while acknowledging potential bidirectionality (e.g., pre-existing negative emotions may drive selective social media use and threat interpretation). The work highlights individual differences (e.g., susceptibility to echo chambers and biased processing) as crucial in understanding how social media contributes to attitude formation toward outgroups.

This multi-method study integrates observational analyses of public social media discourse with a national survey to explain anti-immigrant emotions in Singapore. It advances theory by extending Integrated Threat Theory to affective prejudice and by demonstrating that cognitive ability not only directly relates to lower prejudice but also conditions how social media-related threat perceptions translate into negative emotions. Empirically, it shows that social media discussions are more negative when immigrants are mentioned and that informational social media use relates to greater negative emotions via symbolic and realistic threats, especially among individuals with lower cognitive ability. Policy and practice implications include monitoring online discourse to anticipate surges in hostile sentiment, promoting digital and media literacy, and fostering cross-group contact both online and offline. Future research should employ longitudinal and experimental designs to establish causality, examine content types and platform features, and disentangle media effects from individual predispositions more precisely.

Study 1 (social media analysis): - Uncertainty about contributors’ nationalities; a vocal minority may dominate discourse, limiting representativeness. - English-only analysis omits posts in other local languages (e.g., Malay, Tamil), potentially underrepresenting minority voices. - Observational design cannot infer effects of exposure on audiences; aggregate analyses cannot capture individual-level mechanisms. Study 2 (survey): - Cross-sectional data preclude causal claims; directionality between social media use, threat perceptions, and emotions cannot be definitively established. - Although quotas matched population parameters on age and gender, panel-based sampling may have unobserved biases. General: - Social media findings may reflect extreme views; thus triangulation with surveys is necessary, as done here.