Bursting the Facebook bubble: we asked voters on the left and right to swap feeds

Social media has made it easy to live in filter bubbles, sheltered from opposing viewpoints. So what happens when liberals and conservatives trade realities?

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The 2016 election took place under the spectre of a bubble. Not the subprime mortgage lending bubble that shaped the 2008 election, but the "filter bubble". Tens of millions of American voters gets their news on Facebook, where highly personalized news feeds dish up a steady stream of content that reinforces users' pre-existing beliefs.

Facebook users are increasingly sheltered from opposing viewpoints - and reliable news sources - and the viciously polarized state of our national politics appears to be one of the results.