6 Policy Brief No. 44 Toda Peace Institute And relevant to the aforementioned 2017 polarisation study — which found that polarisation seems to be happening faster in groups with less social media exposure — the authors of the “Echo Chamber” paper further say that, “the context in which we encounter information matters. Endorsements from friends on social media and algorithmic rankings can influence the information people consume, but these effects are more modest and contingent than many assume. Strikingly, our vulnerability to echo chambers may instead be greatest in offline social networks, where exposure to diverse views is often more rare.” This is not to say that we are not seeing homophily, or “birds of a feather flocking together,” on social media platforms. We are! Both this 2011 study by Conover et al., and this one from 2016 by Gregory and Du, give further details of how homophily operates on Twitter. Yet although these studies use words like “polarization” and “echo chambers” in their write-ups, their results show homophily — they do not necessarily show a link to offline polarisation. 5. Asymmetric Polarisation: When Polarisation Works Differently Across Political Lines The phrase “asymmetric polarisation” refers to the broad phenomenon of political sides getting polarised differently. This is particularly relevant to citizens of today’s politically polarised US. The 2018 book Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics by Harvard scholars Benkler, Faris, and Roberts contains a detailed discussion of how polarisation is advancing faster on the right than on the left. One does not need to agree with the historical or political explanations suggested by the book to take in its documentation of asymmetric polarisation. When we say that polarisation is visible on digital media even if digital media is not necessarily driving it, asymmetric polarisation makes a good case study. In a 2018 Twitterspecific study by Bail et al. titled “Exposure to opposing views on social media can increase political polarization,” the researchers found that experimentally exposing people to the other side’s views on Twitter seems to reinforce pre-existing views rather than changing them — and the effect was stronger in right-wing subjects than in left-wing. Specifically, Republicans became more polarised when exposed to opposing views on Twitter than Democrats. (Differences between political audiences have also been reported by field workers experimenting with depolarisation interventions using social media platforms. There are examples in the “Interventions by Independent Organisations” section of my second brief, “Polarisation and Peacebuilding Strategy on Digital Media Platforms: Current Strategies and Their Discontents.”) 6. Viral Tactics and the Global Underground Disinformation Trade Regardless of how we came to this pass, lots of people are taking advantage of our polarised environment. Propaganda, false news, and coordinated harassment campaigns are just a few strategies that thrive in a polarised environment — often by exploiting audiences’ emotional responses in specific, calculated ways. One 2017 study by Brady et al., “Emotion shapes the diffusion of moralized content in social networks,” found that “the presence of moral-emotional language in political messages [on