Research seem to suggests it does not.
Vox - Something is breaking American politics, but it's not social media.
Pew Research Center: APSA conference roundup: Research on political polarization on social media and the U.S. Congress.
What if social media isn’t driving rising polarization in American politics?
That’s the conclusion of a new paper by Levi Boxell, Matthew Gentzkow, and Jesse Shapiro. Their study, released recently through the National Bureau of Economic Research, tests the conventional wisdom about polarization on social media nine ways from Sunday and finds that it’s wrong, or at least badly incomplete.
Their approach is simple. Using data from the American National Election Survey, they compare the most web-savvy voters (the young, where 80 percent used social media in 2012) and the least web-savvy voters (the old, where fewer than 20 percent used social media in 2012) on nine different tests of political polarization. The measures cover everything from feelings about political parties to ideological consistency to straight-ticket voting, and the data shows how polarization changed among these groups between 1996 and 2012.
The results? On fully eight of the nine measures, “polarization increases more for the old than the young.” If Facebook is the problem, then how come the problem is worst among those who don’t use Facebook?
Polarization is happening mostly among old folks.
