Thanks for writing this and for your research in this area. Based on my own read of the literature, it seems broadly correct to me, and I wish that more people had an accurate impression of polarization on social media vs mainstream news and their relative effects.
While I think your position is much more correct than the conventional one, I did want to point to an interesting paper by Ro’ee Levy, which has some very good descriptive and casual statistics on polarization on Facebook: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3653388. It suggests (among many other interesting findings) that Facebook probably is somewhat more slanted than mainstream news and that this may drive a small but meaningful increase in affective polarization. That being said, it’s unlikely to be the primary driver of US trends.
Thanks for writing this and for your research in this area. Based on my own read of the literature, it seems broadly correct to me, and I wish that more people had an accurate impression of polarization on social media vs mainstream news and their relative effects.
While I think your position is much more correct than the conventional one, I did want to point to an interesting paper by Ro’ee Levy, which has some very good descriptive and casual statistics on polarization on Facebook: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3653388. It suggests (among many other interesting findings) that Facebook probably is somewhat more slanted than mainstream news and that this may drive a small but meaningful increase in affective polarization. That being said, it’s unlikely to be the primary driver of US trends.