Researchers from the universities of Cambridge and New York suggest in a new study that tweets and Facebook posts about opposing political parties are much more likely to be shared.
The team analyzed about 2.7 million posts from news media accounts and members of the US Congress, meaning that those who shared the most information about opposing politicians were politicians .
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The researchers found that posts about political opponents were shared roughly twice as often as posts about the party itself.
Additionally, each additional word about an adversary, such as ‘Democrat’ or ‘Leftist’ in a message from a Republican, increased the likelihood of a turnout by 67% . As we can read in the study:
Out-of-group language consistently emerged as the strongest predictor of actions and retweets: the average effect size of out-of-group language was about 4.8 times stronger than negative affective language and about 6.7 times stronger than moral language. -emotional.
The Wall Street Journal already noted last year that Facebook researchers had warned the company that its "algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to division." The researchers therefore warn that amplifying this rhetoric can incite violence in the real world , such as the assault on the US Capitol in January.