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Bounded Confidence: How Ai Could Exacerbate Social Media’S Homophily Problem, Dylan Weber, Scott Atran, Rich Davis

New England Journal of Public Policy

The advent of the Internet was heralded as a revolutionary development in the democratization of information. It has emerged, however, that online discourse on social media tends to narrow the information landscape of its users. This dynamic is driven by the propensity of the network structure of social media to tend toward homophily; users strongly prefer to interact with content and other users that are similar to them. We review the considerable evidence for the ubiquity of homophily in social media, discuss some possible mechanisms for this phenomenon, and present some observed and hypothesized effects. We also discuss how the …