Bridging or Breaking: Impact of Intergroup Interactions on Religious Polarization
Keywords: social media, polarization, religion, heterogeneous treatment effects, intergroup interaction
TL;DR: This work investigates religious polarization on Twitter using a novel embedding-based metric, and finds that intergroup interactions during COVID-19 related events have varying effects on it, based on event types and individual group conformity.
Abstract: While exposure to diverse viewpoints may reduce polarization, it can also have a backfire effect and exacerbate polarization when the discussion is adversarial. Here, we examine whether intergroup interactions around important events affect polarization between majority and minority groups in social networks. We compile data on the religious identity of nearly 700,000 Indian Twitter users engaging in COVID-19-related discourse during 2020. We introduce a new measure for an individual's group conformity based on contextualized embeddings of tweet text, which helps us assess polarization between religious groups. We then use a meta-learning framework to examine heterogeneous treatment effects of intergroup interactions on an individual's group conformity in the light of communal, political, and socio-economic events. We find that for political and social events, intergroup interactions reduce polarization. This decline is weaker for individuals at the extreme who already exhibit high conformity to their group. In contrast, during communal events, intergroup interactions can increase group conformity. Finally, we decompose the differential effects across religious groups in terms of emotions and topics of discussion. The results show that the dynamics of religious polarization are sensitive to the context and have important implications for understanding the role of intergroup interactions.
Track: Social Networks, Social Media, and Society
Submission Guidelines Scope: Yes
Submission Guidelines Blind: Yes
Submission Guidelines Format: Yes
Submission Guidelines Limit: Yes
Submission Guidelines Authorship: Yes
Student Author: Yes
Submission Number: 2151
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