Despite this apparent consensus, empirical studies offer a much more nuanced
view of how social media affects political polarization, oftentimes questioning basic
premises of this argument. Even if most political exchanges on social media take
place among people with similar ideas, cross-cutting interactions are more frequent
than commonly believed (Barberá, Jost et al. 2015), exposure to diverse news is
higher than through other types of media (Barnidge 2017; Fletcher and Nielsen
2018a; Silver et al. 2019), and ranking algorithms do not have a large impact on the
ideological balance of news consumption on Facebook or Google (Bakshy,
Messing, and Adamic 2015; Haim, Graefe, and Brosius 2018). A potential
explanation for this series of ﬁndings is that social networking sites increase
exposure to information shared by weak ties (Granovetter 1977), such as
coworkers, relatives, and acquaintances, who are more likely to share novel
Social_Media_and_Democracy