  The rise of social media has been argued to intensify uncivil and hostile
online political discourse. Yet, to date, there is a lack of clarity on what
incivility means in the political sphere. In this work, we utilize a
multidimensional perspective of political incivility, developed in the fields
of political science and communication, that differentiates between
impoliteness and political intolerance. We present state-of-the-art incivility
detection results using a large dataset of 13K political tweets, collected and
annotated per this distinction. Applying political incivility detection at
large-scale, we observe that political incivility demonstrates a highly skewed
distribution over users, and examine social factors that correlate with
incivility at subpopulation and user-level. Finally, we propose an approach for
modeling social context information about the tweet author alongside the tweet
content, showing that this leads to improved performance on the task of
political incivility detection. We believe that this latter result holds
promise for socially-informed text processing in general.
