This is not the first study to question social media’s supposedly central role in the drama of right-wing populism. Shortly after Trump’s election, economists at Brown and Stanford found that he performed more poorly than Mitt Romney and John McCain among Americans who get their news online, while the voters he converted were often the very offline.

This kind of evidence doesn’t mean that online conspiracy mongering has no influence on populism. People who rarely use the internet might be more easily deceived by fake headlines when they do wander online. Normal partisans may get kookier under the sustained influence of the memeplex. And Cohen is right that small communities of depraved people, from pedophiles to anti-Semites, use online platforms in vicious ways — and internet giants invoke free expression while shirking their responsibility to deny such viciousness a refuge.

But we should be more doubtful of Cohen’s larger narrative, which is commonplace among progressives — a narrative that invokes the “sewer” of social media to explain everything from climate-change skepticism to anti-immigration sentiment, portrays Russian trolls and YouTube stars as the crucial actors of the populist era, and proposes the regulation of online speech as the main restorative that the liberal order needs.

Instead, the evidence in the papers cited above hints at a different scenario — in which because educated liberalism is increasingly so very online itself, ensconced in its own self-reinforcing information bubble, liberals end up analyzing populism exclusively through their digital experience even when that analysis is obviously insufficient.

In a recent Boston Review essay, Tufts political scientist Eitan Hersh notes that many American liberals participate in politics through a kind of uber-online “political hobbyism,” in which real-world organizing recedes in favor of constant engagement “from behind screens or with earphones on.”