Political uses of the ancient past on social media

A new study, co-authored by Dr Chiara Bonacchi, Chancellor's Fellow in Heritage, Text and Data Mining and Senior Lecturer in Heritage, with Dr Jessica Witte (University of Edinburgh) and Professor Mark Altaweel (UCL Institute of Archaeology) - 'Political uses of the ancient past on social media are predominantly negative and extreme' - has shown that references to Britain’s ancient past are most likely to be invoked alongside negative and extreme views in political exchanges on social media.

The study scrutinised nearly 1.5 million posts using a combination of AI, computational and manual techniques. A range of sentiment analysis tools were used to evaluate the attitudes behind those posts that reference Britain’s distant past. Political posts that most frequently referenced ancient history tended to be more extreme, hostile and overwhelmingly negative in tone than the average, they found. Researchers examined often-heated debates around Brexit on Facebook as a test case to see how references to the Iron Age, Roman and medieval periods in Britain are inserted into online political debate. Facebook users arguing for a specific side of a complex political issue are more likely to justify their positions through ‘historical thinking’ if they hold negative and extreme views.

You can find out more about the study at the link below.

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