Social media platforms provide several social interactional features. Due to the large scale reach of social media, these interactional features help enable various types of political discourse. Constructive and diversified discourse is important for sustaining healthy communities and reducing the impact of echo chambers. In this paper, we empirically examine the role of a newly introduced Twitter feature, 'quote retweets' (or 'quote RTs') in political discourse, specifically whether it has led to improved, civil, and balanced exchange. Quote RTs allow users to quote the tweet they retweet, while adding a short comment. Our analysis using content, network and crowd labeled data indicates that the feature has increased political discourse and its diffusion, compared to existing features. We discuss the implications of our findings in understanding and reducing online polarization.
In the last decade, blogs have exploded in number, popularity and scope. However, many commentators and researchers speculate that blogs isolate readers in echo chambers, cutting them off from dissenting opinions. Our empirical paper tests this hypothesis. Using a hand-coded sample of over 1,000 comments from 33 of the worlds top blogs, we (nd that agreement outnumbers disagreement in blog comments by more than 3 to 1. However, this ratio depends heavily on a blogs genre, varying between 2 to 1 and 9 to 1. Using these hand-coded blog comments as input, we also show that natural language processing techniques can identify the linguistic markers of agreement. We conclude by applying our empirical and algorithmic (ndings to practical implications for blogs, and discuss the many questions raised by our work. A review of research suggests that the desire for opinion reinforcement may play a more important role in shaping individuals’ exposure to online political information than an aversion to opinion challenge. The article tests this idea using data collected via a webadministered behavior-tracking study with subjects recruited from the readership of 2 partisan online news sites (N = 727). The results demonstrate that opinion-reinforcing information promotes news story exposure while opinion-challenging information makes exposure only marginally less likely. The influence of both factors is modest, but opinionreinforcing information is a more important predictor. Having decided to view a news story, evidence of an aversion to opinion challenges disappears: There is no evidence that individuals abandon news stories that contain information with which they disagree. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.