Does Facebook cause Polarization?

A slurry of recent articles assert that Facebook increases polarization and perhap radicalization among its users. Facebook is circling the wagons to counter this narrative, even asking its employees to help push back. After all, if they claim to be the company that brings people together, it would be unfortunate to be widely seen as having the opposite effect.

The first step to understand how Facebook may or may not polarize us is to look at how recommendation engines work. The following is more or less true of Twitter and YouTube (Google) and basically any ad-driven…