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6 - Political Inference from Content on the News Feed

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 August 2018

Jaime E. Settle
Affiliation:
College of William and Mary, Virginia
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Summary

END Framework behaviors can be considered polarizing intergroup interactions only if Facebook users can recognize and categorize the political identities of others based on the content they post. This chapter provides strong evidence in support of that premise. Facebook users—regardless of their level of political sophistication—draw inferences about the political inclinations of users who post political, as well as politicized and seemingly apolitical, content to the News Feed. Even when given a “don’t know” response option, more than three-quarters of people ascribe partisanship to a user based solely upon a single piece of content that user supposedly posted. These inferences are not haphazard guesses. High rates of consensus suggest that Facebook users perceive widely recognizable signals about the kinds of preferences that map to partisan views, drawing inferences that are generally accurate but biased in predictable ways. Specifically, subjects recognize the direction of a poster’s partisan leaning, but over-attribute identity strength and fail to recognize a lack of partisan identity. When source cues reinforce the intuitions people have based on the content alone, the cues tend to strengthen the signal of the poster’s political identity. Frequent Facebook usage increase people’s confidence in their ability to infer accurately.
Type
Chapter
Information
Frenemies
How Social Media Polarizes America
, pp. 136 - 160
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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