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It is no secret that U.S. politics is polarized. An experiment conducted by MIT researchers now shows just how deeply political partisanship directly influences people’s behavior within online social networks.
Deploying Twitter bots to help examine the online behavior of real people, the researchers found that the likelihood that individuals will follow other accounts on Twitter triples when there appears to be a common partisan bond involved.
“When partisanship is matched, people are three times more likely to follow other accounts back,” says MIT professor David Rand, co-author of a new paper detailing the study’s results. “That’s a really big effect, and clear evidence of how important a role partisanship plays.”