People with extreme views are also more vocal, so that's what you see. That's why social media is bad for you. If gives you a very distorted view of the world. Most people are able to look at politics with nuance.
Discourse evaporated when the rightwing and Faux "News" declared "compromise" as blasphemy. That's why so many moderate Republicans will still vote along party lines, despite knowing the candidate is batshit crazy. To vote Democrat is to commit suicide to those people.
Edit: was trying to get this comment done before kid woke up from nap and barely made it. Fixed the faux pa.
Social media politics is confirmation bias by design.
A few of my opinions that are less popular here:
Unions are not a perfect solution.
landlords are not inherantly bad and it's not a "sit back and cash in" type of job.
Bridled Capitalism is a better system than the comunism we've tried so far.
I have no desire to debate any of those here.
I talk politics with friends and in person and I try to remain skeptical especially of facts that happen to go my way.
Its probably because extremists don't feel comfortable expressing their views in their everyday life, so they do it online instead, where they have some anonymity or at least don't face the same backlash as they would if they were to voice their opinions at work or at a bar or something.
Also, controversial takes get more engagement, which means more ad revenue.
Really benign obvious thoughts don't spur engagement. The fringe political viewpoints cause comments and shares and therefor will always look like the only things people are talking about when your method of interacting with content is molded by an algorithm designed to increase engagement to support advertising revenue.
Sounds tin foil hat, but it's actually by design as none of these companies are even remotely non-profit.
And remember, if you're a centrist, you're actually a baby murdering nazi conmunist women controlling alt-right-left marxist thatcherite bigoted sheep!
I mean I get that it's a meme, and exaggerated for comic effect... But yeah that's what the world looks like if one semi-willfully misinterprets other people's views into weird caricatures of what they actually believe. And it's sadly a really common thing to do.