Political divide forms social media relationships, says MIT

Researchers at MIT Sloan School of Management found that politics is the tie that binds strangers on social media.

The "experiment" created bot Twitter accounts with identical descriptions, except for their political party and the strength of their party identification. The accounts followed Democratic and Republican users and analyzed how likely the users were to follow the bots back. "Our experiment shows that shared partisanship does indeed have a large impact on social tie formation," MIT Sloan School of Management Prof. David Rand, one of the authors of the study, said in a statement.  On both sides, users were roughly three times more likely to form social ties with strangers who identify with the same party, compared to "counter-partisans," Rand said.