Our Misguided Obsession with Twitter | The New Yorker

The survey partitioned respondents into seven “tribes” defined by shared beliefs and behavior. The group farthest to the left, the “progressive activists,” contained only eight per cent of the population, and the group furthest to the right, “devoted conservatives,” contained only six per cent. Combined, however, these two political extremes were much more likely to share political content on social media than the less partisan groups. As Haidt emphasizes, these two groups are also the whitest and richest of those studied, meaning that Twitter’s increasingly heated wrangling is not just far from a considered democratic debate but has truly become a spectacle driven by a narrow and unrepresentative group of élites.