Flutterby™! : Political Polarization

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

There is mounting concern that social media sites contribute to political po- larization by creating “echo chambers” that insulate people from opposingviews about current events. We surveyed a large sample of Democrats andRepublicans who visit Twitter at least three times each week about a range ofsocial policy issues. One week later, we randomly assigned respondents to atreatment condition in which they were offered financial incentives to follow a 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 measurethe effect of this treatment, and at regular intervals throughout the study pe-riod 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.