the feminist librarian reads

What about social media? Doesn’t it encourage echo chamber behavior? Not according to a paper by the New York University political scientist Pablo Barberá. It is true, he finds, that people tend to follow like-minded individuals on Twitter — about two-thirds of the people followed by the median Twitter user in the United States share the user’s political leanings. But his analysis also shows that those American users who are embedded in even modestly diverse networks tend to follow a less ideologically homogeneous group of people over time. Rather than polarizing us further, encountering differing views online may encourage people to broaden their information stream.