Racial Minorities Face Discrimination From Across the Political Spectrum When Seeking to Form Ties on Social Media: Evidence From a Field Experiment
通过田野实验发现，社交媒体用户在建立联系时对黑人账户的回应率低于白人账户，且这种歧视不受用户政治倾向的影响。
We conducted a preregistered field experiment examining racial discrimination in tie formation on social media. We randomly assigned research accounts varying on race (Black, White) and politics (liberal/Democrat, conservative/Republican, neutral) to follow a politically balanced sample of Twitter (i.e., X) users ( N = 5,951) who were unaware they were in a research study. We examined three predictions from the social and political psychology literatures: i) individuals favor White over Black targets, ii) this tendency is stronger for conservatives/Republicans than for liberals/Democrats, and iii) greater discrimination by conservatives/Republicans is explained by the assumption that racial minorities are liberal/Democrat. We found evidence that individuals were less likely to reciprocate social ties with Black accounts than White accounts. However, this tendency was not moderated by individuals’ political orientation, shared partisanship, or partisan mismatch. In sum, this work provides field experimental evidence for racial discrimination in tie formation on social media by individuals across political backgrounds.