Those are vague slogans, and I don't think they're true (or more precisely: they rely on conditions that won't exist in the contexts where you're trying to appl

Those are vague slogans, and I don't think they're true (or more precisely: they rely on conditions that won't exist in the contexts where you're trying to apply them). For instance: put a committed extreme left-liberal in front of Fox News opinion programming for 8 hour a day, and they'll be more likely to die of an aneurysm due to constant rage than to moderate. If the distance is too great, throw-em-together online contact isn't going to do anything to bring people closer together. At large ideological distances, the only kind of contact that can bring people together is a very slow, deliberate, and personal kind (e.g. the opposite of social media). That's why my comment was about engineering smaller-distance contacts.