Tiffany Lau, Department of Government
While social media is now an essential site of election campaigns and political discourse, political life online is plagued by misinformation, disinformation, ‘fake news’, propaganda, hostility, trolls, bots, and more. The vast majority of political content online is produced by a tiny minority of unrepresentative users, and tends to be moralized, emotional, and contentious - i.e., highly polarized.
While plenty of work has been done in the race to understand whether this is causing political dysfunction, e.g. whether social media is causing polarization or increasing the probability of violence, less has been done to understand the secondary social consequences, for instance, whether such a climate surrounding American political discussions online is affecting our ability to trust one another and work together. More specifically, does exposure to polarized political discourse online affect generalized trust?