Their paper concludes that ideological segregation online is "low in absolute terms, higher than most offline media (excluding national newspapers) and significantly lower than segregation" in most normal social interactions people have.
We find that ideological segregation of online news consumption is low in absolute terms, higher than the segregation of most offline news consumption, and significantly lower than the segregation of face-to-face interactions with neighbors, co-workers, or family members.
The analysis said these attackers, which include the Orlando shooter and the couple who gunned down 14 people in San Bernardino, often acted alone and did not have "sustained, substantive, in-person contact with foreign terrorist organizations," rather they "scraped together ideological justification" from online and social media sources.
Although many internet companies are trying to wipe terrorist content from their platforms, ISIS, al Qaeda and many other groups still push out thousands of ideological messages a day online.
In May Chen Jin, Nanjing University's president, said the university intended to work with Coursera, an American MOOC provider which has signed a deal with NetEase, a Chinese distributor, to host online courses.Practical and ideological barriers to the spread of MOOCs seem to be dissolving.
The latter sometimes sounded feasible and worthy of examination; at other times, they arrived wrapped in the same time-wasting ideological tinfoil that make people rant online about grassy knolls and UFO sightings.
Munson said his research suggests that ideological sequestration isn't any worse online than it is in other media.
On average, a Facebook user who publicly asserts his political alignment has one online friend who is his ideological opposite for every four who are ideologically aligned with him.
Commentators and journalists (and, of course, Barack Obama) have long bemoaned the division of America into highly polarized ideological camps, said to be reinforced by online filtering.
Now, he argues, while our lives are increasingly defined by the political and ideological, and increasingly conducted in offices and online, there is much to be learned from the Australian landscape and its original peoples.
