Social media's effect on public opinion and polarization

Abstract

Social media has played a substantial role in how individuals communicate and connect with the world around them, but social media also plays a role in how individuals perceive the political environment and shapes individuals' opinions on current events and issues in today's world. This paper looks at how social media affects public opinion and the polarization of American politics by looking at traditional public opinion shaping factors, such as selective exposure, partisan-motivated reasoning, priming, framing, and agenda setting, and evaluates the unique roles of these factors on public opinion via social media. This paper also looks at distinctive attributes of social media, such as spam accounts and the communication structure, and determines these attributes' effect on public opinion. These different phenomena of political science and social media serve to support the argument that social media plays a unique role in shaping public opinion and affects political polarization in the American political environment.