Electronic Farewells in the Digital Age

Abstract

To examine how political differences on social media disrupt user relationships, we conduct two 2 (political disagreement vs. political agreement) × 2 (civil vs. uncivil discussion) between-subjects experiments, with adult and college student samples. The results show that political disagreement heightens feelings of uncomfortableness, which in turn increases the intention to engage in social media filtering actions. Discussion manner moderates the association between uncomfortableness and social media filtering intention in college students, but not in adults. Uncomfortableness positively predicts filtering intention with civil discussion, whereas uncivil discussion leads to higher social media filtering intention regardless of the level of uncomfortableness. We discuss theoretical and practical implications of these findings, which have implications for the development of strategies aimed at mitigating the trends of political polarization.