If we want to really understand how social media echo chambers shape our political beliefs, we need to solve a “chicken or the egg” problem: do our social media networks shape our political beliefs, or do our political beliefs determine who we connect with in the first place? 

Chris Bail, Breaking the Social Media Prism, p.15

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To the extent that social media allow us to create our very own feeds, and essentially live in them, they create serious problems. And to the extent that providers are able to create something like personalized experiences or gated communities for each of us, or our favorite topics and preferred groups, we should be wary. Self-insulation and personalization are solutions to some genuine problems, but they also spread falsehoods, and promote polarization and fragmentation. An architecture of serendipity counteracts homophily, and promotes both self-government and individual liberty. 

Cass Sunstein, #republic, p.14

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Because they tap into apparently common-sense understandings of our world…, moral panics are deeply persuasive, and echo chamber and filter bubble concepts have therefore been accepted widely (often rather unquestioningly)… In particular, even while ramping up their own social media offerings, mainstream news media have gladly accepted the idea of social media as echo chambers because it enables them to claim that, compared to these new competitors for the attention of news audiences, only the carefully researched and edited news published by established news outlets offers a balanced news diet that penetrates the cocoon. 

Axel Bruns, Are Filter Bubbles Real? Introduction

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[T]he causal connection between policy preferences and party loyalty has become warped, with partisans adjusting their policy preferences to align with their party identity. For example, a recent experiment demonstrated that Republicans exhibit a liberal attitude shift after exposure to a clip of President Donald Trump voicing a liberal policy position; there is little evidence to suggest that Democrats are immune to analogous shifts in response to their own political leaders. Overall, the severity of political conflict has grown increasingly divorced from the magnitude of policy disagreement… 

“Political Sectarianism in America…” Science 370, no. 6516 (October 30, 2020)

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Influence, activism, and profit are increasingly intertwined. The line between authentic enthusiasm versus paid promotion blurs the line between content and propaganda. It’s not subterfuge per se—but when online presence is monetizable, truth/untruth and interest/disinterest lie along a spectrum. The influencer may genuinely believe what he’s saying but is also benefiting financially or gathering more attention… 

Renee DiResta, Invisible rulers, p.105

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[P]olitical polarization is not as bad as most people think… Though Americans [in the mid-1990s] were divided about contentious issues such as abortion, the sociologist Paul DiMaggio and his colleagues discovered that the rates of disagreement about this and many other divisive issues did not increase between the 1970s and 1990s. Meanwhile, the social psychologist Robert Robinson was leading a team that was about to make a parallel discovery. Robinson’s team recruited college students who took liberal or conservative positions on abortion and racial conflict. In addition to measuring each student’s opinion on a range of questions related to each issue, the team also asked the students to estimate what people from the opposing party thought about each issue. The results would not have surprised DiMaggio and his colleagues: both liberals and conservatives drastically overestimated the difference between their views and those of the other side. They also underestimated the amount of difference in views within their own side.

Chris Bail, Breaking the Social Media Prism, p.99