Integrated or Segregated? User Behavior Change after Cross-Party Interactions on Reddit

TL;DR

This study examines whether cross-party interactions on Reddit lead to increased engagement with opposing political communities or reinforce existing partisan behaviors, revealing conditional effects on user behavior change.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence on how cross-party replies influence user engagement, highlighting the nuanced and conditional nature of depolarization effects on social media.

Findings

Cross-party replies do not significantly increase out-party activity unless they are responses to other comments.

Receiving a cross-party reply increases in-party activity similarly to same-party replies.

Depolarization effects are highly conditional and linked to feedback dynamics in user interactions.

Abstract

It has been a widely shared concern that social media reinforces echo chambers of like-minded users and exacerbate political polarization. While fostering interactions across party lines is recognized as an important strategy to break echo chambers, there is a lack of empirical evidence on whether users will actually become more integrated or instead more segregated following such interactions on real social media platforms. We fill this gap by inspecting how users change their community engagement after receiving a cross-party reply in the U.S. politics discussion on Reddit. More specifically, we investigate if they increase their activity in communities of the opposing party, or in communities of their own party. We find that receiving a cross-party reply to a comment in a non-partisan discussion space is not significantly associated with increased out-party subreddit activity, unless the comment itself is already a reply to another comment. Meanwhile, receiving a cross-party reply is significantly associated with increased in-party subreddit activity, but the effect is comparable to that of receiving a same-party reply. Our results reveal a highly conditional depolarization effect following cross-party interactions in spurring activity in out-party communities, which is likely part of a more general dynamic of feedback-boosted engagement.