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The research

Why echo chambers matter

Cogito is built on one claim: the way we get news is pulling us apart. Here is the evidence behind it, including what it doesn’t show.

By the numbers

70%

of U.S. social media users rarely or never post about political or social issues.

Pew Research Center, 2021

6 million

voters, by the highest estimate, stayed home in 2024 because of safety concerns.

States United Democracy Center, 2025

61%

of Republicans got news from Fox News in the past month. No other outlet reached 30% of them.

YouGov, 2025

Feeds reward agreement

Social platforms rank posts by how much engagement they will earn, because time spent scrolling is time spent seeing ads. Writing for the Brookings Institution, Paul Barrett, Justin Hendrix and Grant Sims concluded that this popularity-based ranking amplifies divisive content, especially inside networks of like-minded users. The platforms aren’t trying to divide anyone. Division is a side effect of what they are built to maximize.

News aggregators aren’t exempt. A 2024 AllSides analysis found that most major aggregators, including Google News, Apple News and Bing, lean left in the stories they surface.

We read different news

A 2014 Pew Research Center study found that 47% of consistent conservatives named Fox News as their main source for political news. Consistent liberals spread across more outlets, with no single source above 15%.

A decade later the split is still there. In YouGov’s 2025 survey of trust in media, Democrats and Republicans had little overlap in the outlets they trust most. CNN, MSNBC and Fox News were the most polarizing: net trust in CNN was 80 points higher among Democrats than among Republicans, and net trust in Fox News was 76 points higher among Republicans.

When each side relies on different outlets, the two can end up with different accounts of the same events.

Fear shrinks the conversation

Seventy percent of U.S. social media users say they rarely or never post about political or social issues. Among them, about a third say they don’t want to be attacked for their views, and about a third worry that what they post will be used against them (Pew Research Center, 2021).

The effect reaches the ballot box. The States United Democracy Center estimates that up to 6 million voters may have stayed home in 2024 because of safety concerns, and found that turnout fell as people’s expectation of violence rose.

Political scientist James Piazza found that democracies where partisans dislike and distrust each other see more political violence. In his survey of 1,899 Americans, people who expressed aversion toward the other party were more likely to endorse political violence (Security Studies, 2023).

Exposure isn’t enough

Seeing the other side doesn’t automatically make people more open. In a 2018 experiment, Twitter users paid to follow an account that shared opposing political views became more polarized, not less, and the effect was strongest among Republicans (Bail and colleagues, PNAS).

That’s why Cogito doesn’t just swap one feed for another. Every story carries a label so you know whose framing you’re reading, and the Bias Detector shows the exact passages behind its result. The aim is to understand how a story is told, not to win an argument about it. Whether that combination changes how people read is still an open question, and one Cogito hopes to measure.

For how the labels themselves are made, see the methodology.

Sources

  • AllSides. (2024, March 5). Most news aggregators biased to the left, including Google, Apple, Bing: AllSides analysis. allsides.com
  • Bail, C. A., Argyle, L. P., Brown, T. W., Bumpus, J. P., Chen, H., Hunzaker, M. B. F., Lee, J., Mann, M., Merhout, F., & Volfovsky, A. (2018). Exposure to opposing views on social media can increase political polarization. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(37), 9216–9221. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1804840115
  • Barrett, P., Hendrix, J., & Sims, G. (2021, September 27). How tech platforms fuel U.S. political polarization and what government can do about it. Brookings Institution. brookings.edu
  • McClain, C. (2021, May 4). 70% of U.S. social media users never or rarely post or share about political, social issues. Pew Research Center. pewresearch.org
  • Mitchell, A., Gottfried, J., Kiley, J., & Matsa, K. E. (2014, October 21). Political polarization and media habits. Pew Research Center. pewresearch.org
  • Orth, T., & Bialik, C. (2025, May 30). Trust in media 2025: Which news sources Americans use and trust. YouGov. today.yougov.com
  • Piazza, J. A. (2023). Political polarization and political violence. Security Studies, 32(3), 476–504. doi.org/10.1080/09636412.2023.2225780
  • States United Democracy Center. (2025, May 12). New research: Fears of election-related violence kept millions of women from voting in 2024. statesunited.org