Disrupting echo chambers? How social media is related to social tolerance through network diversity: linked lives over a major life course event

Existing echo chamber studies tend to focus on political attitudes within specific online platforms. We broaden this scope by examining social media use and attitudes within a real-world context that resembles an echo chamber: rural areas characterized by low racial/ethnic diversity and low social tolerance. Rural environments often lack conditions conducive to higher social tolerance due to limited cross-group interaction and lower formal education. However, the rural-to-university transition, a major life course event, typically leads to expanded social circles and increased tolerance for young adults who leave, while leaving tolerance unchanged in rural communities. This is attributed to the university experience, which fosters social mixing and education, coupled with reduced contact with former ties from the rural community. We hypothesize that social media alters these traditional trajectories. Using survey data from five cohorts of student-parent pairs, we investigate how shared use of social media platforms relates to network composition and social tolerance. We find that shared social media use constrains network diversity and tolerance among white university students, while conversely expanding ties to people of color and increasing social tolerance for their parents remaining in rural areas. These results offer new insights into the complex relationship between social media and the composition of personal networks, demonstrating how social media can both disrupt and reinforce echo chambers by linking lives across the life course.