Liberals and conservatives share information differently on social media

Area of Science:

• Political Science
• Computational Social Science
• Communication Studies

Background:

• Social media platforms enable direct communication between politicians and citizens.
• Citizens are key agents in the dissemination of political information online.
• Understanding ideological differences in content sharing is crucial for political communication research.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether conservative and liberal citizens differ in their choices of sharing politicians' social media content.
• To analyze the breadth of issues and content toxicity shared by different political ideologies on social media.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of over 13 million users' sharing of 1,293,753 messages from US Congress members on Twitter (2009-2019).
• Leveraging political ideology estimates derived from over 3.5 billion prior retweets.
• Utilizing a standard classifier to rate the toxicity of shared content.

Main Results:

• Liberals retweeted statements covering a broader range of issues compared to conservatives.
• Liberals shared statements with content rated as relatively more toxic.
• Results suggest liberals may be exposed to more diverse and toxic content from elected representatives due to political homophily.

Conclusions:

• Ideological differences significantly shape the consumption and dissemination of political content on social media.
• Findings highlight potential implications for political polarization and information exposure within different ideological groups.
• Further research is needed to explore the underlying explanations for these observed patterns in content sharing.