Republicans Experience "Backfire Effect" in Study on Exposure to Opposite Views [View all]
Source: Inverse.com
The so-called “filter bubble” on social media, which leads to people seeing only content with which they ideologically agree, has been criticized in recent years for contributing to the polarization of politics. A new scientific study has turned that hypothesis on its head, with Republicans and Democrats faring differently in the research.
It turns out that exposure to opposing views on social media actually increases political polarization, according to the latest research by Columbia University. The findings were released on Tuesday ahead of their publication in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The researchers surveyed 901 Democrats and 751 Republicans for their experiment, making sure to choose people who used Twitter three times a week. They were paid $11 to follow a custom-made Twitter bot that espoused political messages opposite to their own beliefs, and that bot was busy: It retweeted 24 messages a day from “high-profile elites with opposing political ideologies” for a month straight. Crucially, the respondents were not told what sort of messages the bot would retweet.
After the month-long period, 62 percent of Democrats and 57.2 percent of Republicans agreed to be surveyed about their experience. Republicans “exhibited substantially more conservative views post-treatment,” report the researchers
Read more: https://www.inverse.com/article/48449-republicans-vs-democrats-twitter-scientific-study
A link to the original study from Columbia University: Exposure to opposing views on social media can increase political polarization
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