1/8 Did you know that Twitter is experimenting with new features that would expose its users to opposing political views? In this @nytimes piece, I describe why this idea could backfire based upon a large online experiment recently conducted by my lab: nyti.ms/2Nu45gL
2/8 We surveyed, 1,225 Republican and Democratic Twitter users about their views on social policies. One week later, we offered them money to follow a Twitter account which they were told would tweet 24 times each day for one month. They were not told what the bots would tweet. 
3/8 The Twitter account gradually began tweeting messages from politicians, media organizations, and advocacy groups with opposing political views. We tracked whether people paid attention by asking them questions about these messages.
4/8 Instead of reducing political polarization, our intervention INCREASED it. Republicans who followed our bots became substantially more conservative. Democrats became slightly more liberal, but this effect was not statistically significant.
5/8 We think this happened because people experience cognitive dissonance when they are exposed to opposing views and begin to think about all the different reasons why they disagree with them, leaving them with even more reasons to reject opposing views.
6/8 Our study DOES NOT bringing Democrats and Republicans into conversation with each other is inherently doomed. Studies tell us intergroup contact is only effective if it is mostly positive and especially when people are cooperating to solve shared problems (i.e. not Twitter)
7/8 But we also can’t move all attempts to reduce political polarization offline. Social media is now the preferred medium for political discussion for too many people, and particularly young people.
8/8 Instead of leaving social media, we should try to fix it. I founded the @polarizationlab @DukeU to develop tools that combine machine learning, network analysis, and natural language processing to help people rewire their social media networks and find common ground
Ps thanks to @GuggFellows @CarnegieCorp @RussellSageFdn for funding this and @dukeu @DukeNewsT @ASAnews for promoting our research.
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