Two weeks ago, the US Electoral College voted Joe Biden in as the next US President. The same day, the Church released a boilerplate statement congratulating Biden and Kamala Harris on their win, thanking Trump and Pence for their service, and asking members to pray for all of them. The statement was then linked in the Church’s public Newsroom group on Facebook. Commenters there proceeded to hold a heated debate that ran to 2200 comments before the Church’s public affairs people (I’m assuming) shut it down.
They didn’t delete the comments that were already up, though, so I thought it would be a fun project to read through them and look for patterns like most commonly raised issues. To be complete, I should note that some of the comments clearly had been deleted, as there were only 1882 remaining when I read them (starting about a week ago). However, given how many pretty unhinged comments still remain up, I doubt that it was the Church PA people deleting them. Rather, it seems more likely that people who had made comments went back and deleted them.
Here’s the data I noted for each of the comments:
- Name of the person making it. I noted this so I could see if it was a few people making a ton of comments, or a lot of people making a few.
- Lean of the comment (Biden – strong, Biden – weak, neutral, Trump – weak, or Trump – strong). Of course this is subjective but it’s pretty clear most of the time.
- Issues raised, which I sorted into a few dozen categories.
- Number of words.
- Comment being replied to, so I could see which comments drew the most replies.
- Number of reactions: Like, Love, Care, Haha, Wow, Sad, Angry
For the 103 people who made five or more comments, I also noted the following:
- Overall lean of their comments. This was straightforward, as people pretty much always showed a consistent lean from one comment to another.
- Total number of comments.
- Gender. Most people declare their gender in their profile.
- Age category (younger, middle aged, older). As most people don’t give their age on Facebook, I guessed based on graduation and marriage dates and apparent ages of children or grandchildren. I was thinking of the age groups as being approximately < 40 for younger, 40 – 64 for middle aged, and 65+ for older. Of the 103 people, I assigned age categories to 92 of them.
Comment Lean
As the graph below shows, Trump-leaning comments outnumbered Biden-leaning ones by nearly a 2:1 ratio. There were also nearly as many neutral comments as Biden-leaning ones.