I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Tuesday, November 23rd.

Here's a surprising or not-so-surprising statistic, depending on how optimistic you are about unity in this country.

52% of Trump supporters believe that red states should split off from the rest of the country

in one survey. 41% almost as much of Biden supporters believe that too. So that's according to a poll from the University of Virginia

Center for Politics. They find disunity or the desire to have nothing to do with the other side

is actually, and ironically, something a lot of us have in common. Our friends over at our Sunday

night live show, the United States of anxiety, have been thinking a lot about this unity lately, wondering if it's a glitch or something baked into the history of this country.

And now that we're on the subject of baking, they have a new social experiment they'd like you to try around the Thanksgiving table, around your holiday mix of, you know, baked goods and political grievances.

And it's all about how we are fed or stuffed, to torture the Thanksgiving metaphor,

stuffed with disparate information online that might push us further and further apart.

The experiment has something to do with the term filter bubbles,

and I will let my guests explain with me now, our host Kai Wright, and senior digital producer of the United States of

Anxiety, Kushan Navadar. Kai, welcome back, and Kusha, welcome to the show.

Hey, Brian. Hey, Brian. Great to meet you. Okay, Kusha, what's a filter bubble? Where does the time come from? Yeah, so to use the tortured metaphor that you just brought up, imagine that you're sitting at that Thanksgiving table and you're sitting across from, you know, the relative you disagree with or the random stranger that just showed up that you also happen to disagree with. you see at the table what you're eating, but do you know what you're each being fed individually

on the websites and the apps that you use?

That in a nutshell is what the filter bubble is about and what it causes.

Websites and apps generally, they want you to stay on there as long as possible. So

they'll often personalize content based on a bunch of different factors to give you things

that they think will make you stay there longer. And one of the risks of that is the kind of

content that you're receiving, videos, articles, posts, whatever, might fit into your

point of view and might leave out things that you might otherwise disagree with. And that's the

phenomenon. It's been around for a while, the term itself, but it's important to always think about

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