Segmenting the Electorate: The Effects of Exposure to Political Extremism Online

Abstract

The Internet provides people with an opportunity to preselect the ideological perspective of the political content they encounter, allowing them to fragment themselves into narrow interest groups and ultimately polarize along ideological lines. This study seeks to test the extremism portion of the fragmentation thesis: that if individuals sort into cocoons of homogeneous perspectives their attitudes will polarize and greater political extremism will result. A random sample of students was exposed to one of four experimental conditions: ideologically homogeneous and highly conservative media, ideologically homogenous and highly liberal content, moderate content, and a condition that included media from each of the three prior conditions. The results demonstrated that exposure to ideological homogeneity did drive attitude extremism in the conservative condition but not in the liberal condition. The moderate condition reduced extremism and the mixed condition demonstrated no significant attitude change. This article concludes that, given media fragmentation, greater extremism is possible. However, this result was only evident in the conservative condition.