Does Participation in a Platform Change the Contributions from Contributors? Evidence from Wikipedians

We analyze the effect of social media on Internet users over time. As users interact with biased and slanted online content, their own political ideologies can become either more extreme or more neutral. We use data from... [ view full abstract ]

We analyze the effect of social media on Internet users over time. As users interact with biased and slanted online content, their own political ideologies can become either more extreme or more neutral. We use data from Wikipedia to identify contributors’ behavioral pattern and change in slant as they voluntarily contribute to biased and slanted articles. We find that contributors tend to edit articles that exhibit the opposite slant, and during these editing experiences the contributor’s own slant becomes more and more neutral over time. Such decline in contributor biases is especially large for contributors who interact with more extreme articles, and articles that have greater biases. We also estimate that this slant convergence process takes one year longer on average for Republicans than for Democrats. Our findings provide evidence that online content does have a significant influence on social media users, as contributors learn from their interactions with extreme-slanted contents, they become more neutral over time.