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References to ancient Britain linked to hostility online

6 September 2024

Collaborative research involving Mark Altaweel (UCL Institute of Archaeology) has found that references to ancient history online tended to be extreme and predominantly negative in tone.

A young man captivated by social media (Image Wikimedia Commons, Author: Doctorxgc: CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)

This new study, led by Chiara Bonacchi (Institute of Archaelogy alumna, now based at the University of Edinburgh) and published this week in PLOS One, scrutinised nearly 1.5 million posts using a combination of AI, computational and manual techniques and used a range of sentiment analysis tools to evaluate the attitudes behind those posts that reference Britain’s distant past.

Examining often-heated debates around Brexit on social media as a test case to see how references to the Iron Age, Roman and medieval periods in Britain are inserted into online political debate, the project team used a range of language processing algorithms to gauge whether the emotion of these posts was positive, negative or neutral, as well as the extremity of the sentiment.

Researchers also spot-checked random posts manually to ensure that the algorithms were faithfully capturing the emotions of users.

According to Mark Altaweel:

Misrepresentations of history are widespread online. This research helps us identify when the past is used to advocate for hostile and extreme positions in political discussions. Ultimately, we hope that this work can help understand interpretations leading to dangerous discussion threads online.”

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Image:  A young man captivated by social media (Wikimedia Commons, Author: Doctorxgc. CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)