The confrontation effect: When users engage more with ideology-inconsistent content online

People typically engage with information that aligns with their ideology and avoid information that challenges it. Here, we demonstrate that online users can become relatively more engaged with content that clashes with their ideology, a pattern we label the confrontation effect. We further show that the outrage evoked by ideology-inconsistent content drives the confrontation effect and reconcile our findings with the more commonly observed congeniality bias. We employ a multi-method approach to test this theoretical framework via observational field data from Twitter, a series field experiments on Facebook, and online lab experiments. Collectively, these findings provide a balanced perspective on the interplay between user ideology and online engagement, with important implications for both organizations and policymakers.