Driving Us Further Apart? The Effect of Exposure to News and Angry User Comments on Social Media on People’s Covid-19 Attitudes

While large parts of the public in most Western countries supported lockdowns and tough restrictions during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, public opinion towards Covid-19 policies has since become more polarized. One of the possible causes of increasing polarization over Covid-19 policy is exposure to news and angry user comments about Covid-19 policy on social media. Drawing on theories of emotional contagion and motivated reasoning, we hypothesize that exposure to news articles about Covid-19 policies presented alongside angry user comments may increase polarization over Covid-19 policies, regardless of whether the news articles and user comments are pro- or counter-attitudinal. To examine this hypothesis, we carried out two online survey experiments, in which we exposed respondents to news articles and user comments (i.e. information) about Covid-19 policies in a simulated Facebook news feed and afterwards measured their attitude towards Covid-19 policies. We randomly varied whether the news articles were pro- or counter-attiudinal and whether the user comment was angry or non-emotional. Our results showed that exposure to pro-attitudinal information made respondents’ Covid-19 attitudes more extreme relative to a control group that was not exposed to any information, whereas exposure to counter-attitudinal information made respondents’ attitudes less extreme relative to the control group. The presence of angry relative to non-emotional user comments did not significantly change the effect of either pro- or counter-attitudinal information, except for respondents living in areas with a high Covid-19 infection rate. In this case, exposure to angry counter-attitudinal information had no effect on respondents’ Covid-19 attitudes. This suggests that when Covid-19 is more threatening and salient, people become more resistant to counter-attitudinal information. Yet, except in this case, our results show that to the extent social media has contributed to increasing polarization over Covid-19, the likely mechanism is exposure to pro-attitudinal information rather than exposure to angry user comments.