Twitter: homophily rules online world as well as offline, research shows

Like its famous avian logo, Twitter users tend to favour birds of a feather - something which may be bad for democracy but good for the biggest flocks of like-minded people on the social media network, a new study suggests. The study analyzed more than two million politically-committed Twitter users. Using links between these users and nearly 500,000 communications during the 2012 U.S. elections, the authors found both conservatives and liberals were exposed to a disproportionate amount of like-minded information. Moreover, like-minded tweets reached them much more quickly than those from the opposite point of view. "When you think about it, it all sounds quite intuitive," said Yosh Halberstam, an assistant professor with the department of economics at the University of Toronto, who co-authored the study with Brian Knight, an economist at Brown University. The study was just published as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research in the United States. Scholars have long argued that democracy functions most effectively when voters have access to high-quality information from a diverse set of sources.