Social media fails to persuade partisans

It turns out that broadening your horizons by perusing opposing points of view on social media may just make the partisan divide worse.

That’s the depressing result of an experiment with 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.

“Partisan divisions not only impede compromise in the design and implementation of social policies but also have far-reaching consequences for the effective function of democracy more broadly,” they wrote.

The researchers, led by Duke University sociologist Christopher Bail, set out to do something about this problem by harnessing the power of Twitter.They already knew people become more inclined to compromise on political issues when they spend time with people who hold opposing views. But whether these dynamics would extend to virtual interactions through social media was unknown.

Bail and his colleagues hired You Gov to survey active Twitter users who selfidentified as either Democrats or Republicans.

Participants indicated the extent to which they agreed or disagreed with 10 state- ments like, “Stricter environmental laws and regulations cost too many jobs and hurt the economy.”

A week later, some of the Democrats were randomly selected to receive an apparently unrelated offer: For $11, would they be willing to follow an automated bot that retweets 24 items every day? These weren’t told the retweets would originate from Twitter accounts belonging to politicians, pundits, nonprofit advocacy groups and media organizations aligned with Republicans. A randomly selected group of the Republican survey-takers got the same offer, and their Twitter bot retweeted messages from accounts aligned with Democrats. After a month, the participants re-took the original 10-item survey. So did the people who were not asked to follow the bots.

Compared to the Democrats who did not follow the conservative bot, those who did “exhibited slightly more liberal attitudes.” The more they had paid attention to the bot’s retweets, the more liberal their attitudes became. But none of these changes were large enough to be statistically significant.

It was a different story for Republicans. Compared to those who did not follow the liberal bot, those who did “exhibited substantially more conservative views” after just one month.

The greater the number of liberal tweets the Republicans absorbed, the more conservative they became. These results were statistically significant.