Religious Identity, Expression, and Civility in Social Media: Results of Data Mining Latter-Day Saint Twitter Accounts

This study explores religious self-identification, religious expression, and civility among projected Latter-Day Saint Twitter accounts (201,107 accounts and 1,542,229 tweets). Novel methods of data collection and analysis were utilized to test hypotheses related to religious identity and civility against social media data at a large scale. Results indicated that (1) projected LDS Twitter accounts tended to represent authentic (rather than anonymous or pseudonymous) identities; (2) local minority versus majority status did not influence users' willingness to religiously self-identify; (3) isolation stigma did not occur when users religiously self-identified; (4) participants exhibited much lower degrees of incivility than was anticipated from previous studies; and (5) religious self-identification was connected to improved civility. Results should be of interest to scholars of religion for better understanding participation patterns and religious identity among Latter-Day Saints and for exploring how these results may transfer to other groups of religious people.