The Impact of Social Media on Polarization

The internet has diffused widely in all the countries we looked at, and under simple stories where this is the key driver, we would have expected polarization to have risen everywhere as well. In our data, neither diffusion of internet nor penetration of digital news are significantly correlated with increasing polarization. Similarly, we found little association with changes in inequality or trade. One explanatory fact that looks more promising is increasing racial diversity. The non white share of the population has increased faster in almost any other country in our sample. And other countries, new zealand and canada, where it has risen sharply, have seen rising polarization as well. It's problematic to try and study the impact of social media on polarization