
Exposure to opposing views can increase political polarization (n=~1600) - anigbrowl
https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/4ygux/
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coldtea
> _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 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 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 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._

Nope, those findings are BS.

"Exposure to opposing views" means continuous exposure, in a regular manner
and in varied circumstances, having people in their social circle holding
them, etc -- not merely read a stream of opposing views for a week.

This will only upset and polarize people, since they already dislike those
views. This is not much more than taking a Hilary supporter in a Trump rally,
or vice versa.

~~~
anigbrowl
You didn't even read the abstract properly so that makes it sort of hard to
take your argument at face value.

