Society is a closed system, twitter is not outside of society.
The people on twitter are real people (well, mostly, probably), and have real political opinions.
If you talk to people, by and large they'll profess moderate opinions, because in person discussions still trigger politeness and non-confrontational emotions in most people, so the default 'safe' thing to say is the moderate choice, no matter what their true opinion happens to be.
The internet allows people to take the proverbial mask off.
I would disagree about proverbial masks. Majority of people in the world including US are simply too preoccupied with their everyday routine, problems and work to end up with extreme political views.
What Internet does have is ease of changing masks and joining diverse groups. Trying something unusual without reprecussions appeal to a lot of people who usually simply dont have time to join such groups offline.
The real problem is that unfortunately propoganda has evolved too with all new research about human phychology, behaviors and fallacies. Abusing weaknesses of monkey brain on scale is relatively easy and profitable.
So most of the republicans I run into are extremely frank about the way the country ought to be run. When I was younger it was the same way with democrats.
The people on twitter are real people (well, mostly, probably), and have real political opinions.
If you talk to people, by and large they'll profess moderate opinions, because in person discussions still trigger politeness and non-confrontational emotions in most people, so the default 'safe' thing to say is the moderate choice, no matter what their true opinion happens to be.
The internet allows people to take the proverbial mask off.