So-called “covert signals” have been commonplace for many decades. For instance, in the 1970s, it was common for gay men to signal their status by having a handkerchief displayed from their back pocket, which was clearly understood by other gay men but largely not by everyone else.

Research from the Santa Fe Institute suggests that we may use similar kinds of covert signals to display our political persuasion online.  The paper suggests that we’re far more likely to use covert signals than we are overt ones, especially in mixed groups that don’t always share our beliefs. The authors argue that these covert signals allow us to communicate with those of a similar mindset without running the risk of suffering a pile-on from those who might disagree.

Covert signals

Obviously detecting covert signals is complicated by the fact that the signals are covert.  To try and do so, they collected tweets from politically extreme Twitter users in the run-up to the 2020 election. The sample included those on both the left and the right of the political spectrum.

The researchers downloaded the followers of each user to understand whether their followers were similarly extreme or slightly more heterogeneous. They followed this by assigning each tweet to one of four groups of raters who were tasked with guessing the political affiliation of the user.

Some of the raters were themselves at the extreme ends of the political spectrum, while others were more moderate. The authors hypothesized that the tweets that generated the most disparate guesses among the raters were those most likely to contain covert signals.

Lastly, the researchers asked each of the raters to play an online game that featured a selection of overt and covert tweets. The raters had to choose which of the tweets to share with groups of either co- or cross-partisan members, with the goal being to maximize the number of likes and avoid a high number of dislikes.

“We wanted to see: when there are more audience members from the out-group, do participants in the game share more covert tweets?” the researchers conclude. “We were quite mind blown, in that it was actually the case!”