2.2% of the population generates 80% of the noise on Twitter.

From You’re probably making incorrect assumptions about your opposing political party by Arthur C. Brooks.

I think he is directionally right but overstates the real polarization. The polarization is at the extremes of each party, not so much in the center and certainly not for the great majority who, when they think of politics at all, think "A pox on both their houses."

But lots of interesting insights and data.

Let’s start with how much Republicans and Democrats actually know about the lives of people on the other side. The authors of a 2017 study in the Journal of Politics revealed that the average Democrat believes that more than 40 percent of Republicans earn more than $250,000 per year. Meanwhile, Republicans believe that nearly 40 percent of Democrats are LGBTQ. How close are these estimates to reality? Not very. Just 2 percent of Republicans are doing that well financially, and just 6 percent of Democrats are LGBTQ.

This I found especially interesting as it reinforces my long held position that most the perception of polarization and discord actually arises from a small margin of people, most of whom are inconsequential themselves.

Heavy social-media use has the same negative effect on viewpoint accuracy. The perception gap is about 10 percentage points higher for those who have shared political content on social media in the past year than those who haven’t. That isn’t much of a shock. Consider, for example, that only about 22 percent of U.S. adults are on Twitter, and 80 percent of the tweets come from 10 percent of users. If you rely on Twitter for political information, you are being informed by ersatz pundits (and propaganda bots) residing within 2.2 percent of the population.