Blocking of counter-partisan accounts drives political assortment on Twitter.

ABSTRACT: There is strong political assortment of Americans on social media networks. This is typically attributed to preferential tie formation (i.e. homophily) among those with shared partisanship. Here, we demonstrate an additional factor beyond homophily driving assorted networks: preferential prevention of social ties. In two field experiments on Twitter, we created human-looking bot accounts that identified as Democrats or Republicans, and then randomly assigned users to be followed by one of these accounts. In addition to preferentially following-back copartisans, we found that users were 12 times more likely to block counter-partisan accounts compared to copartisan accounts in the first experiment, and 4 times more likely to block counter-partisan accounts relative to a neutral accoun

SUBMITTER: Martel C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11110939 | biostudies-literature | 2024 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature