Perspective-taking to Reduce Affective Polarization on Social Media
- URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2110.05596v1
- Date: Mon, 11 Oct 2021 20:25:10 GMT
- Title: Perspective-taking to Reduce Affective Polarization on Social Media
- Authors: Martin Saveski, Nabeel Gillani, Ann Yuan, Prashanth Vijayaraghavan,
Deb Roy
- Abstract summary: We deploy a randomized field experiment through a browser extension to 1,611 participants on Twitter.
We find that simply exposing participants to "outgroup" feeds enhances engagement, but not an understanding of why others hold their political views.
framing the experience in familiar, empathic terms by prompting participants to recall a disagreement does not affect engagement, but does increase their ability to understand opposing views.
- Score: 11.379010432760241
- License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
- Abstract: The intensification of affective polarization worldwide has raised new
questions about how social media platforms might be further fracturing an
already-divided public sphere. As opposed to ideological polarization,
affective polarization is defined less by divergent policy preferences and more
by strong negative emotions towards opposing political groups, and thus
arguably poses a formidable threat to rational democratic discourse. We explore
if prompting perspective-taking on social media platforms can help enhance
empathy between opposing groups as a first step towards reducing affective
polarization. Specifically, we deploy a randomized field experiment through a
browser extension to 1,611 participants on Twitter, which enables participants
to randomly replace their feeds with those belonging to accounts whose
political views either agree with or diverge from their own. We find that
simply exposing participants to "outgroup" feeds enhances engagement, but not
an understanding of why others hold their political views. On the other hand,
framing the experience in familiar, empathic terms by prompting participants to
recall a disagreement with a friend does not affect engagement, but does
increase their ability to understand opposing views. Our findings illustrate
how social media platforms might take simple steps that align with business
objectives to reduce affective polarization.
Related papers
- On the Use of Proxies in Political Ad Targeting [49.61009579554272]
We show that major political advertisers circumvented mitigations by targeting proxy attributes.
Our findings have crucial implications for the ongoing discussion on the regulation of political advertising.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2024-10-18T17:15:13Z) - Dynamics of Polarization Under Normative Institutions and Opinion
Expression Stewarding [5.22145960878624]
We establish that human normativity, that is, individual expression of normative opinions based on beliefs about the population, can lead to population-level polarization.
Using a game-theoretic model, we establish that individuals with more extreme opinions will have more extreme rhetoric and higher misperceptions about their outgroup members.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2024-03-10T17:02:19Z) - Bridging or Breaking: Impact of Intergroup Interactions on Religious
Polarization [10.640364016644883]
We examine whether intergroup interactions around important events affect polarization between majority and minority groups in social networks.
We use data on the religious identity of nearly 700,000 Indian Twitter users engaging in COVID-19-related discourse during 2020.
We find that for political and social events, intergroup interactions reduce polarization. This decline is weaker for individuals at the extreme who already exhibit high conformity to their group.
In contrast, during communal events, intergroup interactions can increase group conformity.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2024-02-19T07:21:09Z) - Understanding Divergent Framing of the Supreme Court Controversies:
Social Media vs. News Outlets [56.67097829383139]
We focus on the nuanced distinctions in framing of social media and traditional media outlets concerning a series of U.S. Supreme Court rulings.
We observe significant polarization in the news media's treatment of affirmative action and abortion rights, whereas the topic of student loans tends to exhibit a greater degree of consensus.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2023-09-18T06:40:21Z) - The Face of Populism: Examining Differences in Facial Emotional Expressions of Political Leaders Using Machine Learning [50.24983453990065]
We use a deep-learning approach to process a sample of 220 YouTube videos of political leaders from 15 different countries.
We observe statistically significant differences in the average score of negative emotions between groups of leaders with varying degrees of populist rhetoric.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2023-04-19T18:32:49Z) - Shifting Polarization and Twitter News Influencers between two U.S.
Presidential Elections [92.33485580547801]
We analyze the change of polarization between the 2016 and 2020 U.S. presidential elections.
Most of the top influencers were affiliated with media organizations during both elections.
75% of the top influencers in 2020 were not present in 2016, demonstrating that such status is difficult to retain.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2021-11-03T20:08:54Z) - Reaching the bubble may not be enough: news media role in online
political polarization [58.720142291102135]
A way of reducing polarization would be by distributing cross-partisan news among individuals with distinct political orientations.
This study investigates whether this holds in the context of nationwide elections in Brazil and Canada.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2021-09-18T11:34:04Z) - News consumption and social media regulations policy [70.31753171707005]
We analyze two social media that enforced opposite moderation methods, Twitter and Gab, to assess the interplay between news consumption and content regulation.
Our results show that the presence of moderation pursued by Twitter produces a significant reduction of questionable content.
The lack of clear regulation on Gab results in the tendency of the user to engage with both types of content, showing a slight preference for the questionable ones which may account for a dissing/endorsement behavior.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2021-06-07T19:26:32Z) - Political Polarization in Online News Consumption [14.276551496332154]
Political polarization appears to be on the rise, as measured by voting behavior.
Research over the years has focused on the role of the Web as a driver of polarization.
We show that online news consumption follows a polarized pattern, where users' visits to news sources aligned with their own political leaning are substantially longer than their visits to other news sources.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2021-04-09T22:35:46Z) - Towards control of opinion diversity by introducing zealots into a
polarised social group [7.9603223299524535]
We explore a method to influence or even control the diversity of opinions within a polarised social group.
We leverage the voter model in which users hold binary opinions and repeatedly update their beliefs based on others they connect with.
We inject zealots into a polarised network in order to shift the average opinion towards any target value.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2020-06-12T15:27:30Z)
This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.
This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.