Content Sharing Dynamics and Political Polarization in Social Media

Abstract

This chapter analyzes the role of political and affective polarization in our interactions on social media. I am interested in understanding, on the one hand, how our mood and preconceptions influence the interpretation of messages on social media, and on the other hand, how the presentation of messages encourages our anger or motivates our joy. For this study, I rely on a series of survey experiments conducted in Argentina at various times from the beginning of the pandemic to the present. As these cases show, the affective reaction of social media users to messages is no different when they see verified information compared to when they share false content