Martin-Gutierrez, SamuelRobles Morales, José ManuelTorcal, MarianoLosada, Juan CarlosBenito, Rosa María2024-07-092024-07-092024Martin-Gutierrez S, Robles JM, Torcal M, Losada JC, Benito RM. In-party love spreads more efficiently than out-party hate in online communities. Sci Rep. 2024;14:15700. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-65688-92045-2322http://hdl.handle.net/10230/60705Includes supplementary materials for the online appendix.In this article, we present the findings of a comprehensive longitudinal social network analysis conducted on Twitter across four consecutive election campaigns in Spain, spanning from 2015 to 2019. Our focus is on the discernible trend of increasing partisan and ideological homogeneity within interpersonal exchanges on this social media platform, alongside high levels of networking efficiency measured through average retweeting. This diachronic study allows us to observe how dynamics of party competition might contribute to perpetuating and strengthening network ideological and partisan homophily, creating ‘epistemic bubbles’ in Twitter, yet showing a greater resistance to transforming them into ‘partisan echo-chambers’. Specifically, our analysis reveals that the rise of a new radical right-wing party (RRP), Vox, has heightened ideological homogeneity among users across the entire ideological spectrum. However, this process has not been uniform. While users aligned with mainstream political parties consistently share content that reinforces in-party affinity, resulting in highly efficient ‘epistemic bubbles’, the emergence of the RRP has given rise to a distinct group of users associated with the most extreme partisan positions, characterized by a notable proportion of out-partisan hostility content, which has fostered the creation of low-efficient 'partisan echo-chambers'.application/pdfeng© The Author(s) 2024. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. Te images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.info:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-65688-9TwitterEpistemic bubblesPartisan echo-chambersRetweetingOut-party hostilityIn-party affinityParty supplyPolarizationinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess