To think about this further, suppose liberals and conservatives on the internet never got their online news from the same place. In other words, liberals exclusively visited liberal websites, conservatives exclusively conservative ones. If this were the case, the chances that two Americans on a given news site have opposing political views would be 0 percent. The internet would be perfectly segregated. Liberals and conservatives would never mix.
Suppose, in contrast, that liberals and conservatives did not differ at all in how they got their news. In other words, a liberal and a conservative were equally likely to visit any particular news site. If this were the case, the chances that two Americans on a given news website have opposing political views would be roughly 50 percent. The internet would be perfectly desegregated. Liberals and conservatives would perfectly mix.
So what does the data tell us? In the United States, according to Gentzkow and 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. Liberals and conservatives are “meeting” each other on the web all the time.
What really puts the lack of segregation on the internet in perspective is comparing it to segregation in other parts of our lives. Gentzkow and Shapiro could repeat their analysis for various offline interactions. What are the chances that two family members have different political views? Two neighbors? Two colleagues? Two friends?
Using data from the General Social Survey, Gentzkow and Shapiro found that all these numbers were lower than the chances that two people on the same news website have different politics.
PROBABILITY THAT SOMEONE YOU MEET HAS OPPOSING POLITICAL VIEWS
On a News Website
45.2%
Coworker
41.6%
Offline Neighbor
40.3
Family Member
37%
Friend
34.7%
In other words, you are more likely to come across someone with opposing views online than you are offline.
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. We usually think of the internet as appealing to the fringes. Indeed, there are sites for everybody, no matter your viewpoints. There are landing spots for pro-gun and anti-gun crusaders, cigar rights and dollar coin activists, anarchists and white nationalists. But these sites together account for a small fraction of the internet’s news traffic. In fact, in 2009, four sites—Yahoo News, AOL News, msnbc.com, and cnn.com—collected more than half of news views. Yahoo News remains the most popular news site among Americans, with close to 90 million unique monthly visitors—or some 600 times Stormfront’s audience. Mass media sites like Yahoo News appeal to a broad, politically diverse audience.
The second reason the internet isn’t all that segregated is that many people with strong political opinions visit sites of the opposite viewpoint, if only to get angry and argue. Political junkies do not limit themselves only to sites geared toward them. Someone who visits thinkprogress.org and moveon.org—two extremely liberal sites—is more likely than the average internet user to visit foxnews.com, a right-leaning site. Someone who visits rushlimbaugh.com or glennbeck.com—two extremely conservative sites—is more likely than the average internet user to visit nytimes.com, a more liberal site.
Gentzkow and Shapiro’s study was based on data from 2004–09, relatively early in the history of the internet. Might the internet have grown more compartmentalized since then? Have social media and, in particular, Facebook altered their conclusion? Clearly, if our friends tend to share our political views, the rise of social media should mean a rise of echo chambers. Right?
Again, the story is not so simple. While it is true that people’s friends on Facebook are more likely than not to share their political views, 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.
How can this be? Don’t our friends tend to share our political views? Indeed, they do. But there is one crucial reason that Facebook may lead to a more diverse political discussion than offline socializing. 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.
In other words, Facebook exposes us to weak social connections—the high school acquaintance, the crazy third cousin, the friend of the friend of the friend you sort of, kind of, maybe know. These are people you might never go bowling with or to a barbecue with. You might not invite them over to a dinner party. But you do Facebook friend them. And you do see their links to articles with views you might have never otherwise considered.
In sum, the internet actually brings people of different political views together. The average liberal may spend her morning with her liberal husband and liberal kids; her afternoon with her liberal coworkers; her commute surrounded by liberal bumper stickers; her evening with her liberal yoga classmates. When she comes home and peruses a few conservative comments on cnn.com or gets a Facebook link from her Republican high school acquaintance, this may be her highest conservative exposure of the day.
I probably never encounter white nationalists in my favorite coffee shop in Brooklyn. But VikingMaiden88 and I both frequent the New York Times site.
THE TRUTH ABOUT CHILD ABUSE AND ABORTION
The internet can give us insights into not just disturbing attitudes but also disturbing behaviors. Indeed, Google data may be effective at alerting us to crises that are missed by all the usual sources. People, after all, turn to Google when they are in trouble.
Consider child abuse during the Great Recession.
When this major economic downturn started in late 2007, many experts were naturally worried about the effect it might have on children. After all, many parents would be stressed and depressed, and these are major risk factors for maltreatment. Child abuse might skyrocket.
Then the official data came in, and it seemed that the worry was unfounded. Child protective service agencies reported that they were getting fewer cases of abuse. Further, these drops were largest in states that were hardest hit by the recession. “The doom-and-gloom predictions haven’t come true,” Richard Gelles, a child welfare expert at the University of Pennsylvania, told the Associated Press in 2011. Yes, as counterintuitive as it may have seemed, child abuse seemed to have plummeted during the recession.
But did child abuse really drop with so many adults out of work and extremely distressed? I had trouble believing this. So I turned to Google data.