Echo Chambers? Analyzing the Impact of Social Media on Political Polarization in the U.S.

Abstract

The rise of social media in the United States has coincided with an increase in political polarization among the electorate. This thesis explores the relationship between “echo chambers” on social media—focusing on Facebook and Twitter—and political polarization in the United States. Echo chambers are places where individuals are exposed almost exclusively to opinions and media that comport with their pre-existing beliefs. This thesis analyzes observational data from the Pew Research Center by utilizing linear and binomial logistic regressions, and finds that social media usage predicts the increased likelihoods of both political polarization and civic engagement offline. This thesis also conducts two experiments with subjects sourced from Amazon Mechanical Turk. The first experiment finds that being exposed to a politically homogeneous news feed may actually cause social media users to become more polarized and less open to bipartisan compromise than if they encounter a politically heterogeneous feed. The second experiment finds that Twitter causes partisan social media users to be more likely to read from cross-ideological news outlets than Facebook, which ultimately suggests that Facebook may be more prone to creating echo chambers than Twitter.