DIGITAL PLATFORMS AND POLITICAL POLARIZATION: A NARRATIVE REVIEW OF ALGORITHMS, MISINFORMATION, AND DEMOCRATIC RESILIENCE

Abstract

The political impact of digital platforms has shifted from the periphery of academic discussion to the centre of public debates, but it is not as clear-cut as is popularly assumed. The paper is a critical narrative review of the linkage between digital platforms and political polarisation, based on a synthesis of the evidence and scholarship that have emerged in political science, communication studies, computational social science and platform governance research since 2015 and prior to 2025. The review does not view polarisation as a single phenomenon but rather as a combination of ideological, affective, perceived, and network-based forms of polarisation and poses the question about whether it is algorithmic curation, filter bubbles, or misinformation that causes polarisation, exacerbates it, or simply mirrors the polarisation that already exists. Algorithmic amplification does not seem to be a uniform cause but an interaction with existing partisan identities and selective user behaviour; false political content, though measurable and consequential in terms of the trust of institutions, is not as voluminous and not as widespread as is suggested by their public alarm; the formation of echo chambers is real for some users but not widespread; and public exposure to this false political content is smaller in volume and more demographically concentrated than public alarm implies. Affective polarisation, by contrast, as well as a decrease in institutional trust and platform business incentives, is more consistent than ideology per se. The review looks at the various platform-level, institutional and individual interventions for strengthening democratic resilience and proposes that none of these alone is enough to make a difference and that the impact of these interventions is strongly dependent on the national media systems and institutional strength. Prioritised research needs include gathering evidence from outside North America and Western Europe. While under certain circumstances, digital platforms can exacerbate polarisation, polarisation is more properly viewed as a socio-technical phenomenon that is a product of platform design, political culture and political institutional context, rather than a direct technological effect.