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Existing research indicates that incidental exposure to political information on social media may function as an equalizer, stimulating political engagement among the politically detached. In this article, we challenge this notion and propose that there are good reasons to assume that incidental exposure may reinforce existing gaps. We test the equalizing against the reinforcing hypothesis using data from a two-wave panel study ( N = 559). We find a positive main effect of incidental exposure on low-effort digital participation. However, this effect was not conditional on political interest, as the equalizing assumption would have suggested. More interestingly, we found that the effect of incidental exposure on high-effort digital participation was conditional on political interest. However, against the assumption of equalization, individuals with low levels of political interest were negatively affected by incidental exposure, thus lending support for the reinforcement hypothesis. Possible reasons for these findings are discussed.

This article conceptualises ‘participatory reluctance’ as a particular orientation to social media that problematises binarised notions of connection and disconnection in social networking sites. It qualitatively examines how the concept has functioned within gay men’s social networking service, Gaydar, among 18- to 28-year-old users of the site in Brisbane, Australia. Participatory reluctance is shown to be a central aspect of the culture of this space, fostered among the studied demographic by the convergence of the growing global push for marriage equality and increasing normalisation of the kinds of gay male identities commonly adopted among this group, with three key factors rooted primarily in Gaydar’s design: (1) young users’ perceptions of the site as a space for procuring casual sex, (2) their perceptions of the imagined user as embodying existing stereotypes of gay masculinity and (3) a lack of genuine alternatives in terms of niche digital spaces for gay men’s social networking.