(2017-05-12) Maybe The Internet Isnt Tearing Us Apart After All

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz: Maybe the Internet Isn’t Tearing Us Apart After All

The day that saw the biggest single increase in membership in Stormfront’s history, by far, was November 5, 2008, the day after Barack Obama was elected president. There was, however, no increased interest in Stormfront during Donald Trump’s candidacy and only a small rise immediately after he won. Trump rode a wave of white nationalism. There is no evidence here that he created a wave of white nationalism. Obama’s election led to a surge in the white nationalist movement. Donald Trump’s election seems to be a response to that.

the key fact that shows that Stormfront users are inhabiting similar universes as people like me and my friends: the popularity of the New York Times among Stormfront users. It isn’t just VikingMaiden88 hanging around the Times site. The site is popular among many of its members. In fact, when you compare Stormfront users to people who visit the Yahoo News site, it turns out that the Stormfront crowd is twice as likely to visit nytimes.com.

The internet, most everybody agrees, is driving Americans apart

There is one problem with this standard view. The data tells us that it is simply not true.

The evidence against this piece of conventional wisdom comes from a 2011 study by Matt Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro

the chances that two people visiting the same news site have different political views is about 45 percent. In other words, the internet is far closer to perfect desegregation than perfect segregation

Why isn’t the internet more segregated? There are two factors that limit political segregation on the internet.

First, somewhat surprisingly, the internet news industry is dominated by a few massive sites

in 2009, four sites—Yahoo News, AOL News, msnbc.com, and cnn.com—collected more than half of news view

Political junkies do not limit themselves only to sites geared toward them

Gentzkow and Shapiro’s study was based on data from 2004–09,

Might the internet have grown more compartmentalized since then?

a team of data scientists—Eytan Bakshy, Solomon Messing, and Lada Adamic—have found that a surprising amount of the information people get on Facebook comes from people with opposing views.

People, on average, have substantially more friends on Facebook than they do offline. And these Weak Ties facilitated by Facebook are more likely to be people with opposite political views.