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Exposure To Opossing View
Exposure To Opossing View
Edited by Peter S. Bearman, Columbia University, New York, NY, and approved August 9, 2018 (received for review March 20, 2018)
There is mounting concern that social media sites contribute to challenges for the study of social media echo chambers and
political polarization by creating “echo chambers” that insulate political polarization, since it is notoriously difficult to establish
people from opposing views about current events. We surveyed whether social media networks shape political opinions, or vice
a large sample of Democrats and Republicans who visit Twit- versa (27–29).
ter at least three times each week about a range of social Here, we report the results of a large field experiment designed
policy issues. One week later, we randomly assigned respon- to examine whether disrupting selective exposure to partisan
dents to a treatment condition in which they were offered information among Twitter users shapes their political attitudes.
financial incentives to follow a Twitter bot for 1 month that Our research is governed by three preregistered hypotheses. The
exposed them to messages from those with opposing political first hypothesis is that disrupting selective exposure to parti-
ideologies (e.g., elected officials, opinion leaders, media orga- san information will decrease political polarization because of
nizations, and nonprofit groups). Respondents were resurveyed intergroup contact effects. A vast literature indicates contact
at the end of the month to measure the effect of this treat- between opposing groups can challenge stereotypes that develop
ment, and at regular intervals throughout the study period to in the absence of positive interactions between them (30). Stud-
monitor treatment compliance. We find that Republicans who ies also indicate intergroup contact increases the likelihood of
followed a liberal Twitter bot became substantially more con- deliberation and political compromise (31–33). However, all of
servative posttreatment. Democrats exhibited slight increases these previous studies examine interpersonal contact between
in liberal attitudes after following a conservative Twitter bot, members of rival groups. In contrast, our experiment creates
although these effects are not statistically significant. Notwith- virtual contact between members of the public and opinion lead-
standing important limitations of our study, these findings have ers from the opposing political party on a social media site.
significant implications for the interdisciplinary literature on polit- It is not yet known whether such virtual contact creates the
ical polarization and the emerging field of computational social
science.
Significance
political polarization | computational social science | social networks |
social media | sociology Social media sites are often blamed for exacerbating political
polarization by creating “echo chambers” that prevent people
from being exposed to information that contradicts their pre-
might enable people to consume more heterogeneous sources Data deposition: All data, code, and the markdown file used to create this report
of information about current events, there is growing concern will be available at this link on the Dataverse: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse.
that such forums exacerbate political polarization because of xhtml?alias=chris bail.
social network homophily, or the well-documented tendency of 1
To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: [email protected]
people to form social network ties to those who are similar to This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.
themselves (25, 26). The endogenous relationship between social 1073/pnas.1804840115/-/DCSupplemental.
network formation and political attitudes also creates formidable Published online August 28, 2018.
lican respondents, and, within each group, we used a block ran- ance, none of these effects were statistically significant. Treated
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domization design that further stratified respondents according Republicans, by contrast, exhibited substantially more conserva-
to two variables that have been linked to political polarization: tive views posttreatment. These effects also increase with level
(i) level of attachment to political party and (ii) level of interest of compliance, but they are highly significant. Our most cautious
in current events. We also randomized assignment according to estimate is that treated Republicans increased 0.12 points on a
respondents’ frequency of Twitter use, which we reasoned would seven-point scale, although our model that estimates the effect of
influence the amount of exposure to the intervention we describe treatment upon fully compliant respondents indicates this effect
Bail et al. PNAS | September 11, 2018 | vol. 115 | no. 37 | 9217
Initial Survey Randomization Weekly Surveys Post-Survey
Respondents were offered $11 One week later, respondents Respondents in treatment Respondents were
to provide their Twitter ID and were assigned to treatment conditions informed they are offered $12 to repeat
complete a 10-minute survey and control conditions within eligible to receive up to $6 each the pre-treatment
strata created using pre- week during the study period
about their political attitudes, survey one month
treatment covariates that for correctly answering
social media use, and describe attachment to party, questions about the content of after initial survey.
media consumption habits frequency of Twitter use, messages retweeted by Twitter
(demographics provided by and overall interest in .Bots.
survey firm). current events.
Treatment Treatment
Offered $11 to
follow Twitter
bot that retweets
24 messages from
Republicans liberal accounts each day for
1 month
Control Control
Treatment Treatment
Offered $11 to
follow Twitter
bot that retweets
24 messages from
conservative accounts each day for
Democrats 1 month
Control Control
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is substantially larger (0.60 points). These estimates correspond Discussion and Conclusion
to an increase in conservatism between 0.11 and 0.59 standard Before discussing the implications of these findings, we first note
deviations. important limitations of our study. Readers should not interpret
Sarah Sanders
Ivanka Trump FOX Steve Daines
4 Create adjacency
matrix that describes
following patterns of
the 4,176 “opinion
v ....
leaders” and conduct
Tucker Carlson
0 0 1
Correspondence
Donald Trump Analysis. Adjust
scores of accounts with
A= 1 0 1
large no. of followers
(see Supp. Materials).
0 1 0
....
Liberal/Conservative Scale
5
component to create
liberal/conservative
0 .14 .28 .42 .57 .71 .85 ideology score for
4,176 opinion leaders.
Liberal Conservative
Bot #1 Bot #2 Create bots that
6
tweet a random
sample of tweets
from the 1-3 (liberal)
and 5-7 (conservative)
quantiles of the
distribution .
our findings as evidence that exposure to opposing political views shape political polarization in other parts of the world. In addi-
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will increase polarization in all settings. Although ours is among tion, we did not study people who identify as independents, or
the largest field experiments conducted on social media to date, those who use Twitter but do so infrequently. Such individuals
the findings above should not be generalized to the entire US might exhibit quite different reactions to an intervention such
population, because a majority of Americans do not use Twit- as ours. Future studies are needed to further evaluate the exter-
ter (24). It is also unclear how exposure to opposing views might nal validity of our findings, because we offered our respondents
Bail et al. PNAS | September 11, 2018 | vol. 115 | no. 37 | 9219
More Liberal More Conservative More Liberal More Conservative
Fig. 3. Effect of following Twitter bots that retweet messages by elected officials, organizations, and opinion leaders with opposing political ideologies for
1 mo, on a seven-point liberal/conservative scale where larger values indicate more conservative opinions about social policy issues, for experiments with
Democrats (n = 697) and Republicans (n = 542). Models predict posttreatment liberal/conservative scale score and control for pretreatment score on this
scale as well as 12 other covariates described in SI Appendix. Circles describe unstandardized point estimates, and bars describe 90% and 95% confidence
intervals. “Respondents Assigned to Treatment” describes the ITT effect for Democrats (ITT = −0.02, t = −0.76, p = 0.45, n = 416) and Republicans (ITT = 0.12,
t = 2.68, p = 0.008, n = 316). “Minimally-Compliant Respondents” describes the CACE for respondents who followed one of the study’s bots for Democrats
(CACE = −0.04, t = −0.75, p = 0.45, n of compliant respondents = 271) and Republicans (CACE = 0.19, t = 2.73, p < 0.007, n of compliant respondents =
181). “Partially-Compliant Respondents” describes the CACE for respondents who correctly answered at least one question, but not all questions, about the
content of a bot’s tweets during weekly surveys throughout the study period for Democrats (CACE = −0.05, t = −0.75, p = 0.45, n of compliant respondents =
211) and Republicans (CACE = 0.31, t = 2.73, p <.007, n of compliant respondents = 121). “Fully-Compliant Respondents” describes the CACE for respondents
who answered all questions about the content of the bot’s tweets correctly for Democrats (CACE = −0.14, t = −0.75, p = 0.46, n of compliant respondents =
66) and Republicans (CACE = 0.60, t = 2.53, p < 0.01, n of compliant respondents = 53). Although treated Democrats exhibited slightly more liberal attitudes
posttreatment that increase in size with level of compliance, none of these effects were statistically significant. In contrast, treated Republicans exhibited
substantially more conservative views posttreatment that increase in size with level of compliance, and these effects are highly significant.
financial incentives to read messages from people or organiza- psychology, communications, and information science. Although
tions with opposing views. It is possible that Twitter users may we found no evidence that exposing Twitter users to opposing
simply ignore such counterattitudinal messages in the absence views reduces political polarization, our study revealed signif-
of such incentives. Perhaps the most important limitation of our icant partisan differences in backfire effects. This finding is
study is that we were unable to identify the precise mechanism important, since our study examines such effects in an exper-
that created the backfire effect among Republican respondents imental setting that involves repeated contact between rival
reported above. Future studies are thus urgently needed not only groups across an extended time period on social media. Our
to determine whether our findings replicate in different popula- field experiment also disrupts selective exposure to informa-
tions or within varied social settings but to further identify the tion about politics in a real-world setting through a combina-
precise causal pathways that create backfire effects more broadly. tion of survey research, bot technology, and digital trace data
Future studies are also needed because we cannot rule out collection. This methodological innovation enabled us to col-
all alternative explanations of our findings. In SI Appendix, we lect information about the nexus of social media and politics
present additional analyses that give us confidence that our results with high granularity while developing techniques for measuring
are not driven by Hawthorne effects, partisan “learning” pro- treatment compliance, mitigating causal interference, and veri-
cesses, variation in the ideological extremity of messages by party, fying survey responses with behavioral data—as we discuss in SI
or demographic differences in social media use by age. At the Appendix. Together, we believe these contributions represent an
same time, we are unable to rule out other alternative explana- important advance for the nascent field of computational social
tions discussed in SI Appendix. For example, it is possible that our science (46).
findings resulted from increased exposure to information about Although our findings should not be generalized beyond party-
politics, and not exposure to opposing messages per se. Similarly, identified Americans who use Twitter frequently, we note that
increases in conservatism among Republicans may have resulted recent studies indicate this population has an outsized influence
from increased exposure to women or racial and ethnic minori- on the trajectory of public discussion—particularly as the media
ties whose messages were retweeted by our liberal bot. Finally, itself has come to rely upon Twitter as a source of news and a
our intervention only exposed respondents to high-profile elites window into public opinion (47). Although limited in scope, our
with opposing political ideologies. Although our liberal and con- findings may be of interest to those who are working to reduce
servative bots randomly selected messages from across the liberal political polarization in applied settings. More specifically, our
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and conservative spectrum, previous studies indicate such elites study indicates that attempts to introduce people to a broad
are significantly more polarized than the general electorate (45). range of opposing political views on a social media site such as
It is thus possible that the backfire effect we identified could be Twitter might be not only be ineffective but counterproductive—
exacerbated by an antielite bias, and future studies are needed to particularly if such interventions are initiated by liberals. Since
examine the effect of online intergroup contact with nonelites. previous studies have produced substantial evidence that inter-
Despite these limitations, our findings have important impli- group contact produces compromise and mutual understanding
cations for current debates in sociology, political science, social in other contexts, however, future attempts to reduce political
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