| Popis: |
Americans preferentially connect with co-partisans on social media, resulting in political homophily. Here, we highlight another powerful, but often overlooked, force that causes homophilous social media networks: preferential breaking, rather than forming, 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 co-partisans, we found that users were 12 times more likely to block counter-partisan accounts compared to co-partisan accounts in Field Experiment 1, and 5 times more likely to block counter-partisan accounts relative to a neutral account or a co-partisan account in Field Experiment 2. We then replicated these findings in a follow-up survey experiment, and found evidence for a surprising motivation for blocking: wanting to avoid seeing any content posted by the blocked user. Our results demonstrate that preferential blocking of counter-partisans is an important phenomenon that may contribute to insulating partisans from countervailing views online. |
