Twitter and American politics

Is Twitter ruining America? That’s the somewhat hyperbolic claim made by Philip Bump in a recent piece at The Atlantic Wire, in which he argues that the social network has had a primarily negative effect on the political environment in the U.S. — in part by creating a kind of echo chamber in which partisans pay attention only to the things they already agree with. This is a variation on the “filter bubble” argument that Eli Pariser popularized in his book of the same name. But does Bump’s claim about Twitter hold any water?