Science failing to find correlations between social media use and affective polarisation

There is this weirdly dominant narrative that social media drives political polarisation. It's not just that I have another good, published explanation for polarisation (Science Advances) – (polarisation is correlated with economic precarity, and we now have data indicating it may be caused by it as well. Basically, trust is a luxury good, you deploy it when you are not at great risk.) But also, I am really worried about the constant scapegoating of what may actually be a useful technology, and it may be confusing the real problems of social media manipulation and disinformation (see comments about that). Note 1: this is a perpetually under-construction blog post (in the old times it would be a Web page). The most interesting, recent articles are actually at the bottom. Note 2: Axel Bruns has an entire book (and several papers and chapters) with more extensive reviews coming to the same conclusion. Once I found Burns' work, I basically gave up adding more articles here (they come out so fast!) but I've added a link into the new Nature & Science studies as of 31 July 2023 update and another Nature review from June 2024. Note 3: There do seem to be some position polarisation effects of the already affectively polarised, but these also happen (perhaps more!) via conventional media, e.g. "reality" television.

• https://www.pnas.org/content/117/6/2761 How social network sites and other online intermediaries increase exposure to news, Michael Scharkow, Frank Mangold, Sebastian Stier, and Johannes Breuer
• Shared Reality: From Sharing-Is-Believing to Merging Minds E. Tory Higgins, Maya Rossignac-Milon, Gerald Echterhoff https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0963721421992027
• Exposure to opposing views on social media can increase political polarization, Christopher A. Bail, Lisa P. Argyle, Taylor W. Brown, John P. Bumpus, Haohan Chen, M. B. Fallin Hunzaker, Jaemin Lee, Marcus Mann, Friedolin Merhout, and Alexander Volfovsky https://www.pnas.org/content/115/37/9216
• No echo in the chambers of political interactions on Reddit, Gianmarco De Francisci Morales, Corrado Monti & Michele Starnini https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-81531-x
• Historical language records reveal a surge of cognitive distortions in recent decades; Johan Bollen,  Marijn ten Thij,  Fritz Breithaupt,  Alexander T. J. Barron, Lauren A. Rutter,  Lorenzo Lorenzo-Luaces, and Marten Scheffer https://www.pnas.org/content/118/30/e2102061118.short
• The echo chamber is overstated: the moderating effect of political interest and diverse media, Elizabeth Dubois & Grant Blank https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2018.1428656?src=recsys
• Greater Internet use is not associated with faster growth in political polarization among US demographic groups; Levi Boxell, Matthew Gentzkow, and Jesse M. Shapiro https://www.pnas.org/content/114/40/10612
• See also particularly chapter 5 of Alberto Acerbi, but also the whole book: Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age, https://global.oup.com/academic/product/cultural-evolution-in-the-digital-age-9780198835943
• Does Social Media cause Polarization? Evidence from access to Twitter Echo Chambers during the 2019 Argentine Presidential Debate; Rafael Di Tella, Ramiro H. Gálvez & Ernesto Schargrodsky https://www.nber.org/papers/w29458 (answer: no. But messing with the feed of polarised people in any way does increase theirs. But has no impact on non polarised.)
• Quantifying social organization and political polarization in online platforms https://nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04167-x, by Isaac Waller & Ashton Anderson, published in Nature. Yet another paper showing that social media doesn't polarise individual users. Reddit's overall content did get polarised in 2016 though by a) new users being disproportionately polarised coming in & b) conservatives getting weirder.
• review article preprint (499 articles reviewed!) Digital Media and Democracy: A Systematic Review of Causal and Correlational Evidence Worldwide, by Philipp Lorenz-Spreen Lisa Oswald Stephan Lewandowsky Ralph Hertwig https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/p3z9v/
• really maddening – documents that social media doesn't add to affective polarisation, shows that a mechanism through which it generates position polarisation, then the title says it has shown affective polarisation. What? Petter Törnberg writing in PNAS https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2207159119
• I basically ran out of time to document all this given how these articles are exploding, and the fact Axel Bruns had already done this in book form (see intro paragraph). But in July 2023 a really notable series of papers got published by leading scholars in Nature and Science. Which to make my point that social media is actually essential infrastructure, I link here to a twitter thread about.
• This is fun, another (compatible with mine) alternative explanation: Michalis Mamakos, Eli J Finkel, The social media discourse of engaged partisans is toxic even when politics are irrelevant, PNAS Nexus, Volume 2, Issue 10, October 2023, pgad325, https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad325
• "Here we identify three common misperceptions: that average exposure to problematic content is high, that algorithms are largely responsible for this exposure and that social media is a primary cause of broader social problems such as polarization. In our review of behavioural science research..."   Misunderstanding the harms of online misinformation, Ceren Budak, Brendan Nyhan, David M. Rothschild, Emily Thorson & Duncan J. Watts  Nature 630:45–53 (2024)
• Leaving Facebook makes you more politically ignorant, but no less polarised, and information interventions don’t help with that first part. I wonder whether “friendship” guidance could help with well being for those remaining on, or if stress is the cost of democracy? Kevin Arceneaux, Martial Foucault, Kalli Giannelos, Jonathan Ladd and Can Zengin Published:09 October 2024
   https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.240280 

Literally a Romanian salt mine–I was in a boat on a lake being rowed by Cameron Cooke