Twitter seems nothing if not politicized, even with a certain former President having been banned from the site.  Research from the University of Exeter Business School explores how central politics is in deciding the kind of people we follow on the social network.

“Americans are much more likely to be socially connected to those with similar political beliefs, both in daily life and on social media,” the researchers say. “But this does not necessarily mean that shared partisanship per se drives social tie formation, because partisanship is confounded with many other factors.”

The researchers assessed the networks of 842 users who had previously retweeted a post from either Fox News or MSNBC, which the researchers used to determine conservative or liberal leanings.

Each of the participants was then monitored by eight bot accounts that were designed to look as human as possible.  Each of the bots had a varying level of partisanship towards either Democrats or Republicans.

Follow back

The researchers developed a probability model that discovered that people were around three times as likely to follow back someone whose political affiliation was aligned with their own.  This was the case even if the political identification was relatively weak.

This phenomenon was found to exist regardless of whether people were Democrats or Republicans, which the researchers believe indicates that this isn’t simply something that blights conservatives.

They believe their study is the first to show the strong influence political affiliation has on our willingness to follow people on social media, which is likely to have a significant impact on the kind of information we’re exposed to and the polarization of political life.

“Our findings demonstrate that people are more likely to be connected to co-partisans not just because of other factors that happen to be correlated with partisanship, such as age, race, geographic location, or other interests and preferences, or because algorithms preferentially recommend new connections with co-partisans,” the researchers conclude.

“Instead, partisans are much more likely to connect to complete strangers simply because they share the same political views.

“This suggests that if one seeks to reduce partisan assortment on social media networks, it may be necessary for algorithms to actively counteract pre-existing psychological biases—biases that are part of the political sectarianism in which America is currently embroiled.”