Communications of the ACM
How Politics Divide Facebook Friendships
Credit: Online Course Store
Georgia Institute of Technology researchers recently conducted a study suggesting that by displaying shared interests between friends during their more confrontational conversations, Facebook could help diffuse possible arguments and alleviate tension. The study also found that increasing exposure and engagement to weak ties could make people more resilient in the face of political disagreement.
"People are mainly friends with those who share similar values and interests," says Georgia Tech researcher Catherine Grevet. "They tend to interact with them the most, a phenomenon called homophily." Facebook's algorithms tend to fill newsfeeds with the friends a person interacts with most often, typically those with strong ties. Grevet says Facebook could help address the issue by adding in a few status updates on both sides of political issues. "Designing social media toward nudging users to strengthen relationships with weak ties with different viewpoints could have beneficial consequences for the platform, users and society," she says.
The research will be presented at the 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, to be held Feb. 15-19 in Baltimore.
From Georgia Institute of Technology
View Full Article
Abstracts Copyright © 2014 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA
No entries found