Johnson and his team have found that when it comes to digesting news of any kind, Americans now exist in a state of pure polarization: the size of the extremes of the left and right are now so large that they outnumber those in the middle ground.
Comment: Pure polarization would mean there is no middle ground.
As a physicist, Johnson is used to seeing populations sorting into bell curves - think of heights and weights, he says. So one might expect that people would naturally sort into this normal distribution when it comes to ideology. Not so. It doesn't even matter whether news is real or fake, let alone left or right: The mere act of absorbing news that everyone else is seeing causes a polarizing effect.
"Even on issues for which there is no conceivable counter-evidence, a surprisingly large number of people may [take] an 'anti-crowd' viewpoint, e.g. the many people who believe the world is flat and attended the 2017 Flat Earth International Conference," Johnson and his team write. "Even within the community of professional scientists, there is a non-zero 'anti-crowd' that are skeptical about global warming."
Comment: "[If] our first connection is through information, that's the tie that's got to be broken." Precisely MSM's agenda. Polarization is step one for MSM biased news. Step two: eliminate alternate news. Step three: MSM 'news' becomes the new truth. This is the concept that should be explored, not the bogus ideas above.