Are Political Opinions Affected by Social Media?

Abstract

Since the introduction of social media, correlations have been found with attention span, behavior, and other social aspects of individuals' lives. However, it has never been made demonstrably clear if social media affects political opinion or political polarization. Some have hypothesized that social media algorithms cause specific content to be fed to the user, thus causing political polarization. The goal of this paper is to establish if there is a correlation or relationship between social media and the strength of one's own political belief; along with seeing if social media affects the political party identification itself. I first thought there would be a positive correlation between social media usage and a left-leaning political opinion. Linear regression tests and Chi-Squared tests were performed. It was found that while social media does not directly affect political belief, there is a positive correlation between social media usage and the strength of one's own political opinion. This could be due to algorithms that feed content that users agree with.

Keywords: social media, political opinion, political polarization, correlation