PDF(Pubmed)
Abstract：
There is strong political assortment of Americans on social media networks. This is typically attributed to preferential tie formation (i.e. homophily) among those with shared partisanship. Here, we demonstrate an additional factor beyond homophily driving assorted networks: preferential prevention of social ties. In two field experiments on Twitter, we created human-looking bot accounts that identified as Democrats or Republicans, and then randomly assigned users to be followed by one of these accounts. In addition to preferentially following-back copartisans, we found that users were 12 times more likely to block counter-partisan accounts compared to copartisan accounts in the first experiment, and 4 times more likely to block counter-partisan accounts relative to a neutral account or a copartisan account in the second experiment. We then replicated these findings in a survey experiment and found evidence of a key motivation for blocking: wanting to avoid seeing any content posted by the blocked user. Additionally, we found that Democrats preferentially blocked counter-partisans more than Republicans, and that this asymmetry was likely due to blocking accounts who post low-quality or politically slanted content (rather than an asymmetry in identity-based blocking). Our results demonstrate that preferential blocking of counter-partisans is an important phenomenon driving political assortment on social media.
摘要：
在社交媒体网络上，美国人的政治分类很强。这通常归因于具有共同党派关系的人之间的优先领带形成（即同质）。这里,除了同质驾驶的各种网络之外，我们还展示了一个额外的因素:优先预防社会关系。在Twitter上的两个现场实验中，我们创建了看起来像人类的机器人账户，识别为民主党人或共和党人，，然后随机分配用户，以跟踪这些帐户之一。除了优先跟进合作社外，我们发现，在第一个实验中，用户屏蔽反党派账户的可能性是合作账户的12倍，在第二个实验中，相对于中立账户或合作账户，阻止反党派账户的可能性要高出4倍。然后，我们在一项调查实验中复制了这些发现，并发现了阻止的关键动机的证据：希望避免看到被阻止用户发布的任何内容。此外,我们发现民主党人比共和党人更倾向于阻止反派，并且这种不对称可能是由于阻止发布低质量或政治倾斜内容的帐户（而不是基于身份的阻止中的不对称）。我们的结果表明，对反党派的优先阻止是推动社交媒体上政治分类的重要现象。
