Twitter users are three times more likely to follow back the accounts of strangers if they share the same political views, according to a new study that sheds light on the phenomenon of “political echo chambers” on social media.

The study saw researchers, including from the University of Exeter Business School, conduct a field experiment on Twitter to test whether shared political affiliation alone was enough to make US users of the platform follow someone back on the platform.

The researchers created a sample of 842 Twitter users by identifying those who had retweeted MSNBC or Fox News posts, and who were therefore likely to hold some degree of partisan bias towards either the Democratic Party or Republican Party, respectively.

Eight human-looking bot accounts that self-identified as either Democrat or Republican - to varying strength of partisanship - then followed the sample Twitter users.

Using a linear probability model, the researchers found that Twitter users were nearly three times more likely to follow back someone whose political affiliation matched their own, regardless of the bot’s strength of political identification.

This was true for both Democrats and Republicans, a finding that runs contrary to previous research arguing that conservatives on Twitter are more likely than liberals to create social ties with people they perceive to be similar to themselves.

Evidence was also found that more partisan Twitter users were especially likely to follow back bots that appeared to share the same strong partisanship.

According to lead author Dr Mohsen Mosleh, lecturer in business analytics at the University of Exeter Business School, demonstrating how shared political affiliation causes the formation of social ties could have “important implications” for political psychology, social media and the state of a politically polarised public.

Mosleh said: “Americans are much more likely to be socially connected to those with similar political beliefs, both in daily life and on social media.

“If one seeks to reduce partisan assortment on social media networks it may be necessary for algorithms to actively counteract pre-existing psychological biases - biases that are part of the political sectarianism in which America is currently embroiled.”

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