Study: Listening to opposition can increase political divide
Dwelling in a political echo chamber — where you encounter only people who agree with you — is hardly conducive to a healthy democracy.
But it turns out that perusing opposing points of view on social media may just make the partisan divide worse.
That’s the depressing result of an unusual experiment involving 909 Democrats and 751 Republicans who spend a lot of time on Twitter.
“Attempts to introduce people to a broad range of opposing political views on a social media site such as Twitter might be not only ineffective but counterproductive,” researchers reported this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The researchers, led by Duke University sociologist Christopher Bail, set out to observe the power of Twitter.
They hired YouGov to survey active Twitter users who self-identified as either Democrats or Republicans. Some of the Democrats and Republicans were randomly selected to receive 24 retweets every day. They were not told the retweets were from accounts with viewpoints opposed to their own.
After a month of reading the tweets, the participants re-took the original survey. So did the people who were not asked to follow the bots.
Compared to the Democrats who did not follow the conservative retweets, those who did “exhibited slightly more liberal attitudes.” The more they had paid attention to the retweets, the more liberal their attitudes became.
Compared to those who did not follow the liberal retweets, the Republicans who did “exhibited substantially more conservative views” after just one month.
But Bail and his colleagues from Duke, Brigham Young University and New York University said it’s too soon to give up on the idea that social media can help bridge the partisan divide.
Twitter is certainly popular, but the majority of Americans still don’t use it. That means the results of this experiment wouldn’t necessarily predict how things would go if a similar initiative were rolled out to Americans as a whole, the researchers wrote.