I keep seeing studies claiming that social media filter bubbles are overstated/nonexistent, based on surveys of peoples' news diets. But, with love and respect to @andyguess @BrendanNyhan and others, I think this severely misunderstands how people read and share new today. https://twitter.com/andyguess/status/1283516615729065987

For one, these studies assume that if Ds and Rs are both visiting the same news sites like NYT & CNN, it must mean they have a common media diet & therefore a shared reality. But any reporter with access to their social media referral stats can tell you this is wrong.

If I write a story whose facts affirm liberal worldviews, it will be shared and read heavily by liberals. The next day, a different story might be shared & read by conservatives. Both groups visited the same NYT domain, but they hardly developed a shared media diet or reality.

If you follow URLs back to social media, which is often how readers see the articles, you'll consistently see them framed in identity-affirming language. Goes triple for non-paywalled sites like CNN. Just bc it's not Daily Caller doesn't mean the reader experience is nonpartisan.

Another common mistake in these studies is assuming that, if a reader clicks on more straight news links than opinion links, his/her online experience is largely nonpartisan. But this gets a couple things wrong.

For one, reader diets have always been like 10-to-1 news-to-opinion. To understand polarization, you have to look at that 1 opinion article that frames how readers process the 10 news links. Or how posts on social platforms frame those 10 news links.

Consider how reliably the most popular posts on Facebook are from hyper-partisan outlets. I promise you everyone reading those Ben Shapiro articles also clicked a bunch of CNN links. They probably read mostly CNN! But through a hyper-partisan social feed. https://twitter.com/kevinroose/status/1281689506110824448

At some point "social media filter bubble" came to be seen as implying that people read 100% Gateway Pundit or 100% Occupy Democrats, but this has always been a straw man. There was a lot of hyperbole about social media after 2016 for sure, but we might be overcorrecting a bit.