Exposure to opposing views on social media can increase political polarization.
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 Twitter bot for 1 month that exposed them to messages
from those with opposing political ideologies (e.g., elected officials, opinion leaders,
media organizations, and nonprofit groups). Respondents were resurveyed 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 posttreatment. Democrats
exhibited slight increases in liberal attitudes after following a conservative Twitter
bot, although these effects are not statistically significant. Notwithstanding important
limitations of our study, these findings have significant implications for the interdisciplinary
literature on political polarization and the emerging field of computational social
science.
Type
Journal articlePermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/17683Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1073/pnas.1804840115Publication Info
Bail, Christopher; Volfovsky, Alexander; Argyle, Lisa P; Brown, Taylor W; Bumpus,
John P; Chen, Haohan; ... Merhout, Friedolin (2018). Exposure to opposing views on social media can increase political polarization. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 115(37). pp. 9216-9221. 10.1073/pnas.1804840115. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/17683.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
Collections
More Info
Show full item recordScholars@Duke
Christopher Andrew Bail
Professor of Sociology
Chris Bail is Professor of Sociology, Public Policy, and Data Science at Duke University,
where he directs the Polarization Lab. A leader in the emerging field of computational
social science, Bail’s research examines fundamental questions of social psychology,
extremism, and political polarization using social media data, bots, and the latest
advances in machine learning.
Bail is the recipient of Guggenheim and Carnegie Fellowships. His research appears
in top journal
Alexander Volfovsky
Assistant Professor of Statistical Science
I am interested in theory and methodology for network analysis, causal inference and
statistical/computational tradeoffs and in applications in the social sciences. Modern
data streams frequently do not follow the traditional paradigms of n independent observations
on p quantities of interest. They can include complex dependencies among the observations
(e.g. interference in the study of causal effects) or among the quantities of interest
(e.g. probabilities of edge formation in a network). My r
Alphabetical list of authors with Scholars@Duke profiles.

Articles written by Duke faculty are made available through the campus open access policy. For more information see: Duke Open Access Policy
Rights for Collection: Scholarly Articles