Impact of Social/Traditional Media on Political Polarization

Abstract

There is a common perception that political polarization is increasing in American society and the blame is often assigned to highly partisan traditional media (e.g., TV news channels) and the emergence of social media echo chambers as the major influencers of political opinion. In this paper, we examine the impact of traditional and social media on political polarization in society via simulations. These simulations examine what happens when a population with normally distributed unipolar political views is exposed to social/traditional media espousing very different types of political views. Our simulations reveal that the political polarization in a population is deeply affected by the political views espoused in the media. If the media is primarily unipolar in terms of political views, the population ultimately become politically unipolar as well. On the other hand, if the media is politically bipolar, the population ultimately becomes politically bipolar. Interestingly, the simulations reveal that social media echo chambers can undo the polarizing impact of partisan traditional media if the echo chambers strictly show content matching the current political views of the users. However, if social media echo chambers expose the users to extreme political views, a population that is initially unipolar in political views will ultimately look like two different populations with very different political centers.