Political identity threats on social media

Daniel S Lane, Yifei Wang, & Alcides Velasquez 

Communication Research | 2026

This paper provides a theoretical and empirical foundation for studying political identity threats on social media. A pilot study (N = 931) established that individuals can recognize both realistic and symbolic threats when they explicitly appear in TikTok videos, but that, (a) threat types are not as discrete as theory suggests and (b) sensitivity to symbolic threat depends on strength of partisan identity. A second, pre-registered experimental study (N = 1,279) found that the presence of explicit threats to political ingroups/outgroups influenced emotions and willingness to engage politically on social media.