SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg via Getty

Maybe we should stick to our own echo chambers after all. People forced to pop their social media bubbles were more likely to strengthen their political beliefs than soften them, according to a new study.

Over the course of a month, a team from Duke University, New York University, and Princeton got regular Republican Twitter users to follow a bot that retweeted tweets from Democrat politicians, pundits and journalists, and vice versa for Democrat Twitter users. More than one thousand people took part.

The team measured the political leanings of the participants before and after the trial. They were asked to rate how much they agreed with statements such as “government is almost always wasteful and inefficient” and “homosexuality should be accepted by society”. Rather than becoming sympathetic to ideas retweeted by the bots, their views became more entrenched. Overall, after leaving their echo chambers, Republicans became substantially more conservative, and Democrats became slightly more liberal.


The results have lessons for those who want to reduce polarised views. “Well intentioned attempts to introduce people to opposing political views on social media might not only be ineffective, but counter-productive,” said the team in the paper.

The study also suggests that though a simple Twitter bot couldn’t drastically alter people’s views, it could still influence them by making them stronger.

Just showing content from the other end of the political spectrum to a partisan voter won’t mean they will automatically soften their beliefs, says Javier Sajuria at Queen Mary University in London. “This paper seems to support that not all exposure to diverse views is good. Some can produce acceptance to these views, but others can produce backlash,” he says.

Reference: SocArXiv, 10.17605/OSF.IO/4YGUX