🚨New in @NatureHumBehav 🚨. Will misinfo warning labels backfire for ppl who distrust fact-checkers? No!. Labels reduce belief in & sharing of false news even for those highly distrusting of fact-checkers - warning labels are a key tool for platforms!.

RT @ROrchinik: Very excited to see this paper out @PNASNexus with awesome collaborators @RaBhui @gershbrain Derek Powell + Rachit Dubey!. W….

RT @DG_Rand: Very happy about this new paper, led by the amazing @Cameron_Martel_ (who is on the job market!).

RT @_mohsen_m: So excited about this paper in JEP:G.@APA_Journals co-authored w/ amazing @Cameron_Martel_ who is on the job market and does….

HUGE thank yous to project co-lead @_mohsen_m & @DG_Rand. Thoughts, comments, & feedback welcome and appreciated as always!!. Paper here: Preprint here:

Overall our results demonstrate the complex underpinnings of online partisan assortment. Partisans pref connect w like-minded others not only bc of recommendation algos -but bc of distinct info & social prefs. Party assortment is an enduring & important feature of social networks.

We also found:.-Information & making friends were most mentioned as follow-back reasons.-Curiosity also oft mentioned, esp for counter-partisan follow-back.-Not wanting info (esp from counter-partisans) & id’ing account as a stranger were most mentioned rzns for ignoring accounts

We found:.-50% of ppl in co-partisan condition who followed-back account mentioned same partisanship as motivation.-58% of ppl in counter-partisan condition who ignored account mentioned diff partisanship as motivation

Ppl also wrote free-responses as to why they made their decision to follow-back or ignore accounts. We conducted exploratory text analyses using GPT4 on these explanations, filtering for answers longer than a few words & considered overall ‘coherent’ (n=515).

These results suggest:.-More issue extreme & out-party disliking ppl are *less likely* to follow-back anyone who isn’t a co-partisan.-More in-party affinitive ppl are *more likely* to follow-back anyone who isn’t a counter-partisan.

Ppl w ⬆️ issue polarization (& to lesser extent ⬆️out-party dislike) were less likely to follow-back neutral & counter-partisans relative to co-partisans. In contrast, ppl w ⬆️ in-party affinity were more likely to follow-back neutral & co-partisans relative to counter-partisans

We recruited n=990 Twitter-using participants on Lucid & asked them to complete these 4 political measures. We then randomly assigned ppl to suppose they’d been followed on Twitter by either a Dem, Rep, or politically neutral human-looking account (similar to our field design).

What underlying social motives are associated with these (dis)preferences?. In a follow-up survey exp, we examine how 4 political covariates - issue polarization, out-party disliking, in-party liking, & political knowledge - may be assoc w pref follow-back behavior.

Altogether, our Twitter field exp shows:.-Users pref co-partisan tie formation not solely to see congenial political content, but also bc of a social pref for connecting w co-partisan humans.-This social pref is equal parts in-party pref & out-party dispref.

For our human-looking accounts, we also find preference for following-back co-partisans is similar in magnitude for dispreference for following-back counter-partisans, relative to our politically neutral condition.

We find:.-Pref follow-back of co-partisan vs counter-partisan explicit bot accounts (ev of simple content prefs).-Even *greater* pref follow-back in human-looking vs bot accounts (ev of additional social motivation)

We ID’d a politically balanced set of Twitter users who RT’d recent posts from Fox News or MSNBC (N=3,013) & randomly assigned users to be followed by one of our accounts over a 14 day period. We then assessed our key outcome: whether users followed-back our accounts.

We pretested our profiles to confirm that:.-Human-looking profiles were perceived more human than bot profiles.-Human & bot profiles perceived as similarly informative. Thus can attribute diffs in follow-back rates btw bot & human accounts to social factors beyond informativeness.

We examine this in a Twitter field exp. We created 3 *explicit bot* accounts and 3 *human-looking* accounts, varying only in their expressed party ID (⅓ Dem, Rep, Politically Neutral)

There is also much work on affective partisan attitudes & polarization - ppl like & trust co-partisans > counter-partisans. Pref follow-back may therefore also be driven by affective social prefs for connecting with *actual* fellow partisans (beyond simple content prefs).

Selective political content exposure is well documented - ppl prefer to see politically agreeable, & avoid politically disagreeable, info. This could be one reason why ppl preferentially follow-back co-partisans online - to help cultivate politically congenial news feeds.