Popularity or Partisanship? Cue Taking on Social Media Among Teens and Adults

The proliferation of social media and rising political polarization have radically changed the landscape of political information transmission. We know little about the effects of these changes in the media landscape on the process of political socialization, despite an expectation that the information adolescents encounter on social media may be particularly relevant to their political development. Canonical research on American political behavior concluded that teenagers do not have firm partisan attachments or ideological orientations. However, recent research suggests that rising polarization has induced teenagers to develop partisan attachments, opening questions about the heuristics they use to parse the information they encounter. In an age where the information environment demands skills for assessing source credibility, we ask: do teens differ from adults in their reliance on traditional party and source cues? What cues do teens use in the absence of strong party cues to assess political arguments? We conducted two studies: a study fielded on a sample of American teenagers ( n = 803) and an identical study fielded to a nationally representative sample of American adults ( n = 1000). We find that while both teenagers and adults find counter-attitudinal messages and partisan messages to be less credible, there is no interaction between those features. Overall, adults’ and teenagers’ political attitudes are affected by message cues in mostly the same way: neither source credibility cues alone nor higher popularity cues affect political attitudes, but counter-attitudinal and partisan messages move respondents in the opposite direction of the tweet’s ideological message.