Sharing extreme opinions about controversial topics: The moderating role of online communication platforms

Controversial topics are those topics on which people tend to take different, quite polarized opinions. We investigate the effect of topic controversy on individuals’ tendency to share extreme opinions with others. While we acknowledge that people tend to hold extreme positions on controversial topics, we hypothesize that whether they share their extreme opinions with others importantly depends on the communication channel they use for sharing. Across three experiments, we show that opinion extremeness generally increases tendency to share, but, more importantly, we show this is more likely to occur when sharers use communication platforms that allow them to select specific, identified recipients, thus having more control on their audience. More specifically, we demonstrate that individuals are more likely to share the extreme versus moderate opinions about controversial topics via email, but such a difference no longer exists when sharing via post on social network pages.