Bubble mentality: political polarization online.

• Author: Sibilla, Nick
• Position: Citings - Brief article

AFRAID YOU'RE living in a social media bubble? Don't panic. According to a January paper by Eytan Bakshy, a researcher for the social networking site Facebook, "online social networks actually increase the spread of novel information and diverse viewpoints" about politics.

Bakshy and co-authors from Facebook and the University of Michigan drew on Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter's work on strong and weak ties. Friends and family who interact frequently with each other have strong ties, while more casual, sporadic acquaintances are weak.

On Facebook the number of comments between two people indicates how strong their ties are. Predictably, a cluster of strong ties resembles an echo...