Fig. 5: Interactions of seed honesty with party affiliation and ideological alignment on affective polarization.

Significant interactions between the honesty scores of the seeds (FmB_s) and the party of the politicians who shared them (Party) in Panel a, and between the standardized ideology scores of the repliers (I_score) and Party in Panel b. The y-axis shows the affectively polarized language of the replies (Pol_r) in both panels. Panel a shows how Pol_r decreases more in fact-speaking seeds by Democrats when compared to Republican seeds. Panel b indicates that Pol_r towards specific party seeds decreases when the repliers’ ideology aligns with the party’s, and increases when it does not. The estimates are derived from the regression described in Equation (3) (see “Methods”). The line-types and colors are mapped on the party of the politicians who composed the seeds. The red dotted line represents seeds by Republicans, whereas the blue solid line indicates seeds by Democrats. The shaded areas around the lines represent the 95% confidence intervals.