I worry about the echo chamber effect. I have friends who are both conservative and liberal, but what I increasingly notice is that each group seems to mostly be friends with their own "type"; i.e. my conservative friends are for the most part only friends with other conservatives, and my liberal friends are for the most part friends with other liberals (there is always the possibility that my friends represent an anomalous sample, but I think that's unlikely. I generally avoid expressing my own political views to someone unless I am extremely close to them, so perhaps this is why I haven't alienated half of my friends yet...)

I think that only showing people news that agrees with their way of thinking leads to the dangerous situation where you end up with a positive feedback cycle of groups self-confirming their own beliefs, and the other side — "them" — is viewed as a deranged bunch that is incapable of irrational thought. While increasing groupthink may lead to higher advertising revenues, it also leads to interpersonal polarization and higher levels of animosity.

There was an interesting NY Times article that came out recently (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/opinion/sunday/a-confessio...) about how liberals and libertarians are far overrepresented in academia. While that in itself didn't surprise me, the comments on the article did. Here are a few of the NYT picks:

> "It's not that conservatives aren't bright; it's that, for the most part, they are narrow-minded and are sure they have the right answers."

> "Conservatives are entitled to their views, but they also must understand that young adults pay thousands of dollars to obtain a college education in order to learn facts, not fiction."

> "Is intolerance necessarily a bad thing?"

> "No scientist holds groundless beliefs to prove some kind of subservience to a deity."

What is interesting is that I frequently hear conservatives making the same comments — just swap out a few of the words:

> "It's not that liberals aren't bright; it's that, for the most part, they are narrow-minded and are sure they have the right answers."

> "Liberals are entitled to their views, but they also must understand that young adults pay thousands of dollars to obtain a college education in order to learn facts, not fiction."

> "Is intolerance necessarily a bad thing?"

> "How could any intelligent person possibly believe the universe came from nothing?"

What I generally find is that the further left or right someone leans, the more similar their personality becomes to their right/left-wing counterpart. In my experience, the "extreme" people are much more similar to each other than they are to the people in the middle of the political spectrum. I would argue that — born into a different family — many of the zealots would hold their opposing view just as strongly.

One oddity that I haven't yet found an explanation for is that conservatives seem to be less prevalent online than liberals. I'm not quite sure why this is the case.