Exposure to Opposing Views can Increase Political Polarization: Evidence from a Large-Scale Field Experiment on Social Media

Abstract

There is mounting concern that social media sites contribute to political polarization by creating "echo chambers" that insulate people from opposing views about current events. We surveyed a large sample of Democrats and Republicans who visit Twitter at least three times each week about a range of social policy issues. One week later, we randomly assigned respondents to a treatment condition in which they were offered financial incentives to follow a 1 Twitter bot for one month that exposed them to messages produced by elected officials, organizations, and other opinion leaders with opposing political ideologies. Respondents were re-surveyed at the end of the month to measure the effect of this treatment, and at regular intervals throughout the study period to monitor treatment compliance. We find that Republicans who followed a liberal Twitter bot became substantially more conservative post-treatment, and Democrats who followed a conservative Twitter bot became slightly more liberal post-treatment. These findings have important implications for the interdisciplinary literature on political polarization as well as the emerging field of computational social science.Political polarization in the United States has become a central focus of social scientists in recent decades (1-7). Americans remain deeply divided on controversial issues such as inequality, race, and immigration. According to the 2016 National Election Study, 59.3% of Clinton voters believe federal aid to the poor should be increased compared to only 20.2% of Trump voters. 77.7% of Clinton voters express favorable attitudes towards the Black Lives Matter movement, whereas 31.2% of Trump voters do the same. 68.9% of Trump voters believe immigration to the United States should be decreased, compared to 21.9% of Clinton voters.Longstanding divides about these and many other issues have far-reaching consequences for the design and implementation of social policies as well as the effective function of democracy more broadly (8-12).America's deep partisan divides are often attributed to "echo chambers," or patterns of information sharing that reinforce pre-existing political beliefs by limiting exposure to heterogeneous ideas and perspectives (13)(14)(15)(16)(17). Concern about selective exposure to information and political polarization has increased in the age of social media (13,(18)(19)(20). The vast majority of Americans now visit a social media site at least once each day, and a rapidly growing number 2 of them list social media as their primary source of news (21). Despite initial optimism that social media might enable people to consume more heterogeneous sources of information about current events, there is growing concern that such forums exacerbate political polarization because of social network homophily, or the well-documented tendency of people to form social network ties to those who are similar to themselves (22, 23). The endogenous relationship between social network formation and political attitudes also creates formidable challenges f...

Twitter Discourses on Climate Change: Exploring Topics and the Presence of Bots

“…Social media generates a more fragmented news environment, more sources with lower quality and channels for bad or fake news (Lazer et al 2018) . Social media exposes users to opposing viewpoints which can activate the boomerang effect of entrenching/reinforcing extreme positions (Bail et al 2018) .…”

“…Beyond just reflecting the media environment at large however, other research has highlighted ways Twitter and other social media platforms may work to promote polarization and ultimately harm democracy (Barberá et al 2018;Sunstein 2018;Tucker et al 2018) . Research has identified three mechanisms: first, social media exposes people to uncivil conversations around contentious issues which leads to increases in affective polarization (Lelkes 2016;Suhay, Bello-Pardo, and Maurer 2018;Weeks 2015) ; second, by generating a fragmented news environment that lowers the overall quality and creates spaces for the spread of disinformation (Lazer et al 2018;Vosoughi, Roy, and Aral 2018) and incorporation of otherwise fringe views (Bail 2012;Farrell 2016a) ; third, it exposes users to larger number of opposing viewpoints which can activate the type of "boomerang" or "hostile media" response seen in general media (Bail et al 2018) .…”

“…Finally, while no research has looked directly at how people respond to exposure to information contrary to their personal beliefs, there is growing experimental evidence that this type of response is at work in other issues on social media. In a large scale experiment using Twitter users, Bail et al (2018) found that for both self-identified Democrats and Republicans, exposure to a treatment of from the opposite ideology lead to these groups to become more liberal in the case of Democrats, and conservative in the case of Republicans. Therefore on the issue of climate change, where similar effects have been demonstrated in other media types (Carmichael et al 2017), it seems quite likely that this mechanism is also at work.…”

Disentangling the Echo Chamber: How Exposure to Congruent and Incongruent Opinion Climates on Social Networking Sites Impacts Users’ Processing and Selection of Information

“…While overtly congruent social networks are commonly associated with attitudinal polarization and increased intergroup bias (Wojcieszak & Garrett, 2018), the exposure to incongruent views is commonly linked to desirable outcomes as, for example, openness to diverging views and increases in political tolerance (Mutz, 2002a). Different from that, rather than improving the relationship between political groups, some research pointed out that the exposure to incongruent views can likewise foster polarization and selective exposure to information (Bail et al, 2018;Weeks et al, 2017). It hence appears that effects of exposure to congruent and incongruent views are contingent to further contextual variables.…”

“…Furthermore, the exposure to incongruent views can evoke attitudinal ambivalence, i.e., the formation of simultaneously positive and negative views on one and the same issue (Huckfeldt et al, 2004;Jonas et al, 1997;Mutz, 2002b), and therefore mitigate own convictions (Schneider & Schwarz, 2017). However, exposure to incongruent views does not mitigate opinions under all circumstances (Bail et al, 2018;Kim, 2015;Weeks et al, 2017;Yardi & boyd, 2010).…”