Symptom or Culprit? Social Media, Air Pollution, and Violence

Xinming Du

No 10296, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: This paper provides the first causal evidence that hostile activities online lead to physical violence. Given the recently documented relationship between pollution and social media, I exploit exogenous variation in local air quality as the first step to instrument for online aggression. In an event study setting, I find volatile organic compounds (VOCs) increase by 7% when refineries experience unexpected production outages. Together with higher air pollution, I find more aggressive behaviors both online and offline, as well as worse health outcomes near refineries. A one standard deviation increase in surrounding VOCs leads to 0.16 more hate crimes against Black people and 0.23 more hospital visits per thousand people each day. Second, I consider how emotional contagion spreads through social networks. On days with pollution spikes, surrounding areas see 30% more offensive and racist tweets and 12% more crimes; those geographically distant but socially networked regions also see offensive and racist tweets increase by 3% and more crimes by 4.5%. Nationally, overlooking spillovers would underestimate crime effects of pollution by 24%. My findings highlight the consequences of social media hostility and contribute to the public debate on cyberspace regulation.

Date: 2023
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-des, nep-ene, nep-env, nep-hea, nep-pay and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp10296.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_10296

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().