Kool-Aid Konfidential

Political scientists have known for a while that we're not so good at knowing our friends' political views; we, instead, tend to just think our friends agree with us much more than they actually do.
Why that's the case is a bit of a mystery. One theory is that we hide disagreement from our friends (or even lie a little about our beliefs) when we're in mixed company (especially when we're in the minority) - so it's only natural that when we disagree...

Tweets rarely go viral. Again, as Goel et al tell us in the paper I blogged about yesterday, almost all tweets we see are either one shot posts (95%) or first round retweets (3%). But that means 2% are viral-ish, being retweeted at least twice down the...

When we think of the many ways social media has transformed our information worlds, one specter that comes to mind is that of the viral story - a news event that may be ignored by the lame-stream, but that seeps its way into Twitter or FB, slowly catches...

I'm not 100% sure what to make of it, but - according to research from Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro - it looks like conservatives spend a lot more time hanging around liberal websites than liberals do on conservative sites.
Here's Gentzkow and Shapiro's breakdown of who visits the ten top conservative and liberal sites:...