Cross-ideological sharing and counterargument

Exposure to different perspectives can foster tolerance, a fundamental principle in democratic societies. Whether social media facilitates the exchange of diverse views is subject to debate. Specifically, it is unclear how often content is shared by diverse users and whether users accompany cross-ideological content with counterarguments. To address this, we collected tweets containing URLs posted on days during which four major events took place in the summer of 2021: the Biden-Putin summit, COVID-19, the #FreeBritney movement, and the MLB All-Star Game. We analyze 1,274,792 tweets across 80,130 active U.S.-based users who tweeted about these topics. We find that a lack of diversity was the modal sharing pattern for partisan topics, the Biden-Putin summit and COVID-19, compared to non-partisan topics, baseball and Britney Spears. Sharing patterns further reveal that URLs related to the more partisan topics tend to circulate among politically like-minded users, whereas non-partisan topics are predominantly shared by users with moderate political leanings. Overall, cross-ideological sharing is rare, but when users share cross-ideological content, they tend to include counterarguments. The findings highlight the need for strategies that promote diverse and constructive information exchange on social media platforms.