expanded

(Mason

2018).

This

Settle (2018) articulates this argument in her recent book, Frenemies: How
Social Media Polarizes America. She convincingly argues that core features of
social media platforms, such as the fusion of social and political content, the
ubiquity of social feedback, the ability to easily infer other users’ political
identity, or the incentives to produce “clickbait-y” and inﬂammatory content
to catch people’s attention, have a direct impact on the aggregate level of
psychological polarization. The mechanism behind these effects is that these
features facilitate the type of psychological processes behind affective
polarization:
in
combination with citizens’ biased information processing. As Settle (2018)

social and political

reinforcement of

identities,

the

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108890960 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Social Media, Echo Chambers, and Political Polarization

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