From Online Feeds to Hostile Beliefs: The Effect of Social Media on Ideological Intolerance

Recent years have seen parallel rises in social media usage and ideological intolerance, leading public commentators and scholars alike to infer a causal relationship between the two.However, this relationship remains empirically untested, and the mechanisms connecting them are poorly understood.I enumerate five potential mechanisms and identify echo chamber intensity as the one most strongly supported by existing literature.Then, I conduct a survey on 120 UCLA undergraduate students testing both the overall relationship and the specific role of echo chamber intensity.The results show no correlation between consumption of political content on social media and ideological intolerance.They also show that echo chamber intensity is correlated with neither consumption of political content on social media nor ideological intolerance.These findings challenge prevailing assumptions and demonstrate the necessity of further research in this area.