One last article that examined the overall polarizing effects of social media is
Allcott et al. (2020). The authors used an incentive design to study how leaving
Facebook affects a variety of outcomes, including political polarization. The
results reveal that deactivation did not signiﬁcantly move affective polarization
or polarization in factual beliefs about current events; but
it reduced
polarization of views on policy issues, using a scale similar to Bail et al.
(2018). However, subjects’ knowledge about current events also decreased,
which suggests that the depolarizing effects of leaving social media may be
explained by a lower level of exposure to political information overall. An
additional limitation of this study is that it focused on the effects of stopping
using social media, which may not necessarily be symmetrical to how the
adoption of these platforms affects individual-level attitudes and behavior.
Social_Media_and_Democracy