Abstract

Many critics raise concerns about the prevalence of ‘echo chambers’ on social media and their potential role in increasing political polarization. However, the lack of available data and the challenges of conducting large-scale field experiments have made it difficult to assess the scope of the problem. Here we present data from 2020 for the entire population of active adult Facebook users in the USA showing that content from ‘like-minded’ sources constitutes the majority of what people see on the platform, although political information and news represent only a small fraction of these exposures. To evaluate a potential response to concerns about the effects of echo chambers, we conducted a multi-wave field experiment on Facebook among 23,377 users for whom we reduced exposure to content from like-minded sources during the 2020 US presidential election by about one-third. We found that the intervention increased their exposure to content from cross-cutting sources and decreased exposure to uncivil language, but had no measurable effects on eight preregistered attitudinal measures such as affective polarization, ideological extremity, candidate evaluations and belief in false claims. These precisely estimated results suggest that although exposure to content from like-minded sources on social media is common, reducing its prevalence during the 2020 US presidential election did not correspondingly reduce polarization in beliefs or attitudes.

Statistical Modeling

Doubly Robust ML Experiment OLS causal inference

Software

R

Highlights

Citation

Nyhan, Brendan, Jaime Settle, Emily Thorson, Magdalena Wojcieszak, Pablo Barberá, Annie Y. Chen, Hunt Allcott, et al. 2023. “Like-Minded Sources on Facebook Are Prevalent but Not Polarizing.” Nature 620(7972): 137–44. doi:10.1038/s41586-023-06297-w.


@article{nyhan_like-minded_2023,
	title = {Like-minded sources on {Facebook} are prevalent but not polarizing},
	volume = {620},
	issn = {0028-0836, 1476-4687},
	url = {https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06297-w},
	doi = {10.1038/s41586-023-06297-w},
	language = {en},
	number = {7972},
	urldate = {2025-09-14},
	journal = {Nature},
	author = {Nyhan, Brendan and Settle, Jaime and Thorson, Emily and Wojcieszak, Magdalena and Barberá, Pablo and Chen, Annie Y. and Allcott, Hunt and Brown, Taylor and Crespo-Tenorio, Adriana and Dimmery, Drew and Freelon, Deen and Gentzkow, Matthew and González-Bailón, Sandra and Guess, Andrew M. and Kennedy, Edward and Kim, Young Mie and Lazer, David and Malhotra, Neil and Moehler, Devra and Pan, Jennifer and Thomas, Daniel Robert and Tromble, Rebekah and Rivera, Carlos Velasco and Wilkins, Arjun and Xiong, Beixian and De Jonge, Chad Kiewiet and Franco, Annie and Mason, Winter and Stroud, Natalie Jomini and Tucker, Joshua A.},
	month = aug,
	year = {2023},
	pages = {137--144}
    }