Weeks, Kim, Hahn, Diehl and Kwak (2019) used a two-wave panel survey fielded during the 2016 U.S. presidential election to show that following politicians on social media is associated with anger at the candidate a respondent opposes and enthusiasm for the candidate they support, both of which are subsequently related to hostile media perceptions — the belief that news coverage is biased against one's own side. Because hostile media perceptions were measured at only one wave, the study could not establish the causal structure of this relationship: it remains unknown whether following politicians on social media drives emotions and hostile media perceptions over time, whether hostile media perceptions reciprocally shape later emotions and following behavior, or both. No study to date has measured hostile media perceptions at multiple waves together with social media following of politicians and campaign emotions; adjacent longitudinal work covers related outcomes (affective polarization, media trust, feelings of representation, political cynicism) but leaves this question open, as do the source study's further unresolved issues: whether the followed politicians' media-bias rhetoric conditions the effects, why the Facebook and Twitter patterns differed, and whether the mechanism holds outside the emotionally charged 2016 U.S. two-party context.

Background

The hostile media effect is the finding, originating with Vallone, Ross and Lepper's (1985) study of pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian partisans' reactions to identical news coverage of the 1982 Beirut massacre, that strongly involved partisans on both sides of an issue perceive the same balanced news coverage as biased against their own side. Hostile media perceptions (HMP) are the individual-level beliefs produced by this phenomenon — the conviction that mainstream news outlets systematically favor the opposing side — and three decades of research have established them as a robust correlate of political involvement (Perloff, 2015). HMP matter because they are linked to declining trust in journalism, avoidance of mainstream news, and susceptibility to alternative media and misinformation.

Social media changed the environment in which such perceptions form. Politicians can now bypass journalistic gatekeepers and speak directly to followers in a personalized way, often with polarizing or media-hostile rhetoric. Weeks, Kim, Hahn, Diehl and Kwak (2019) asked whether this direct channel contributes to HMP. Using a two-wave panel survey (the same respondents interviewed twice weeks apart) of U.S. adults during the 2016 presidential election, they found that following politicians on social media was associated with anger toward the presidential candidate a respondent opposed and enthusiasm for the candidate they supported — campaign emotions that, in turn, were subsequently related to stronger HMP. This is a mediated association: following politicians is linked to emotions, which are linked to perceiving news coverage as hostile to one's side. The design, however, measured HMP only in the second wave, so it could not establish temporal ordering or rule out reverse influence.

The methodological vocabulary for the open part of this question is standard in political communication. A cross-lagged panel model estimates whether an earlier measurement of variable X predicts a later measurement of variable Y while controlling for the earlier measurement of Y, and vice versa, so that reciprocal influence can be detected; random-intercept cross-lagged panel models (RI-CLPM) refine this by separating stable between-person differences from within-person change over time. Such designs require every construct — here, following behavior, emotions, and HMP — to be measured at multiple waves. Related constructs that recur in the adjacent literature are affective polarization (the emotional gap between one's own party's supporters and the opposing party's supporters) and the reinforcing spirals perspective (the idea that media use and attitudes mutually influence each other over time in a feedback loop).

Further unresolved issues surround the study in addition to the causal-ordering gap that its two-wave design makes evident. The source study leaves open whether the effects are conditioned by the rhetoric of the specific politicians respondents follow, especially their use of media-bias claims; why the observed patterns differed between Facebook and Twitter (an asymmetry independently reported by Kenski, Kim and Jones-Jang, 2022); and whether the mechanism, observed in a single emotionally charged U.S. presidential election, holds in other electoral and national contexts.

Problem Statement

Determine the causal structure of the relationship among following politicians on social media, campaign emotions, and hostile media perceptions (HMP) — the perception that news coverage is biased against one's own political side. The question is which of the following competing causal accounts holds: (a) following politicians on social media increases subsequent emotions and HMP, as the mediated association of Weeks, Kim, Hahn, Diehl and Kwak (2019) suggests; (b) HMP instead shape later emotions and following behavior (reverse causation); (c) both, in a reciprocal feedback loop; or (d) neither, the observed associations being produced by stable between-person differences or confounds.

The further issues noted in the Background — how the followed politicians' own rhetoric, especially their use of media-bias claims, conditions these effects; why the observed associations differed between Facebook and Twitter; and whether the causal structure replicates in other electoral and national contexts, including multiparty systems and less emotionally charged campaigns — remain open adjacent questions motivated by the source study's design limits.

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