How does social media altered the way we think about politics? A study published a few months ago suggests that merely being exposed to ideas that are counter to your own are not enough to reduce polarization and may even increase it. In the experiment, Democrats and Republicans were offered $11 to follow bots that retweeted messages from officials and leaders with political views in opposition to their own. A month later, Republican participants who’d followed a liberal Twitter bot expressed substantially more conservative views. Democrats who’d followed a conservative Twitter bot became slightly more liberal, but the effect was smaller (and not statistically significant). It might seem like a version of the “backlash effect” I discussed here earlier today, and we should be cautious about reading too much into it. For one thing, Twitter users are only a small subset of the voting public, and it’s just a single study. But it does offer a word of caution against assuming that simple exposure to other views will make people more accepting of alternate views.