scholarly journals The echo chamber effect on social media

2021 ◽  
Vol 118 (9) ◽  
pp. e2023301118
Author(s):  
Matteo Cinelli ◽  
Gianmarco De Francisci Morales ◽  
Alessandro Galeazzi ◽  
Walter Quattrociocchi ◽  
Michele Starnini
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Information Diffusion ◽  
Gun Control ◽  
Interaction Networks ◽  
Echo Chambers ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Echo Chamber ◽  
Shared Narrative ◽  
Formation Of Groups ◽  
Chamber Effect

Social media may limit the exposure to diverse perspectives and favor the formation of groups of like-minded users framing and reinforcing a shared narrative, that is, echo chambers. However, the interaction paradigms among users and feed algorithms greatly vary across social media platforms. This paper explores the key differences between the main social media platforms and how they are likely to influence information spreading and echo chambers’ formation. We perform a comparative analysis of more than 100 million pieces of content concerning several controversial topics (e.g., gun control, vaccination, abortion) from Gab, Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter. We quantify echo chambers over social media by two main ingredients: 1) homophily in the interaction networks and 2) bias in the information diffusion toward like-minded peers. Our results show that the aggregation of users in homophilic clusters dominate online interactions on Facebook and Twitter. We conclude the paper by directly comparing news consumption on Facebook and Reddit, finding higher segregation on Facebook.

scholarly journals Viral misinformation and echo chambers: the diffusion of rumors about genetically modified organisms on social media

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (5) ◽  
pp. 1547-1564
Author(s):  
Xiaohui Wang ◽  
Yunya Song
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Genetically Modified Organisms ◽  
Genetically Modified ◽  
Content Type ◽  
User Attitudes ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Echo Chamber ◽  
Fact Checking ◽  
Chamber Effect

PurposeThe spread of rumors on social media has caused increasing concerns about an under-informed or even misinformed public when it comes to scientific issues. However, researchers have rarely investigated their diffusion in non-western contexts. This study aims to systematically examine the content and network structure of rumor-related discussions around genetically modified organisms (GMOs) on Chinese social media.Design/methodology/approachThis study identified 21,837 rumor-related posts of GMOs on Weibo, one of China's most popular social media platforms. An approach combining social network analysis and content analysis was employed to classify user attitudes toward rumors, measure the level of homophily of their attitudes and examine the nature of their interactions.FindingsThough a certain level of homophily existed in the interaction networks, referring to the observed echo chamber effect, Weibo also served as a public forum for GMO discussions in which cross-cutting ties between communities existed. A considerable amount of interactions emerged between the pro- and anti-GMO camps, and most of them involved providing or requesting information, which could mitigate the likelihood of opinion polarization. Moreover, this study revealed the declining role of traditional opinion leaders and pointed toward the need for alternative strategies for efficient fact-checking.Originality/valueIn general, the findings of this study suggested that microblogging platforms such as Weibo can function as public forums for discussing GMOs that expose users to ideologically cross-cutting viewpoints. This study stands to provide important insights into the viral processes of scientific rumors on social media.

scholarly journals Echo chamber detection and analysis

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Giacomo Villa ◽  
Gabriella Pasi ◽  
Marco Viviani
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Community Detection ◽  
Virtual Communities ◽  
Selective Exposure ◽  
Social Needs ◽  
News Sources ◽  
Detection Strategy ◽  
Echo Chambers ◽  
Echo Chamber ◽  
Content Aware

AbstractSocial media allow to fulfill perceived social needs such as connecting with friends or other individuals with similar interests into virtual communities; they have also become essential as news sources, microblogging platforms, in particular, in a variety of contexts including that of health. However, due to the homophily property and selective exposure to information, social media have the tendency to create distinct groups of individuals whose ideas are highly polarized around certain topics. In these groups, a.k.a. echo chambers, people only "hear their own voice,” and divergent visions are no longer taken into account. This article focuses on the study of the echo chamber phenomenon in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, by considering both the relationships connecting individuals and semantic aspects related to the content they share over Twitter. To this aim, we propose an approach based on the application of a community detection strategy to distinct topology- and content-aware representations of the COVID-19 conversation graph. Then, we assess and analyze the controversy and homogeneity among the different polarized groups obtained. The evaluations of the approach are carried out on a dataset of tweets related to COVID-19 collected between January and March 2020.

Infodemics on Youtube: Reliability of Content and Echo Chambers on COVID-19 (Preprint)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Niccolò Di Marco ◽  
Matteo Cinelli ◽  
Walter Quattrociocchi
Keyword(s):  
Information Diffusion ◽  
Two Dimensions ◽  
World Health ◽  
Interaction Patterns ◽  
Political Preference ◽  
Political Bias ◽  
Echo Chambers ◽  
Echo Chamber ◽  
Health Organization ◽  
The Relationship

UNSTRUCTURED Social media radically changed how information is consumed and reported and elicited a disintermediated access to an unprecedented amount of content. The world health organization (WHO) coined the term infodemics to identify the information overabundance during an epidemic. Indeed, the spread of inaccurate and misleading information may alter behaviours and complicate crisis management and health responses. This paper addresses information diffusion during the COVID-19 pandemic period with a massive data analysis on YouTube. First, we analyze more than 2M users’ engagement in 13000 videos released by 68 different YouTube channels, with different political bias and fact-checking indexes. We then investigate the relationship between each user’s political preference and her/his consumption of questionable/reliable information. Our results, quantified using information theory measures, provide evidence for the existence of echo chambers across two dimensions represented by the political bias and by the trustworthiness of information channels. Finally, we observe that the echo chamber structure cannot be reproduced after properly randomizing the users’ interaction patterns.

Reconciling Social Media with Luxury Fashion Brands

2015 ◽  
pp. 917-945 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wilson Ozuem ◽  
Kerri Tan
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Information Diffusion ◽  
Cultural Transformation ◽  
Marketing Communications ◽  
Communication Media ◽  
Communications Media ◽  
Customer Expectations ◽  
Fashion Brand ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Human Association

Modern developments in communication media are creating new networks of information diffusion which are profoundly altering the way in which people can construct shared ‘realities'. Internet along with its prototypical subsets, notably social media, is enabling the emergence of new mechanism of human association which are shaped by – yet also shape – the development of this new medium of communication. This chapter integrates social media theory and luxury fashion brand theory arguments to examine the knowledge benefits that this cultural transformation provides to the development of a marketing communications programme. The authors argue that the key to providing an effective marketing communication programme is understanding and responding to customer expectations through the integration of social media platforms and traditional marketing communications media.

scholarly journals Who to Trust on Social Media: How Opinion Leaders and Seekers Avoid Disinformation and Echo Chambers

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 205630512091399
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Dubois ◽  
Sara Minaeian ◽  
Ariane Paquet-Labelle ◽  
Simon Beaudry
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
News Media ◽  
Political Information ◽  
Opinion Leaders ◽  
Internet Users ◽  
Dependent Variables ◽  
Echo Chambers ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Information Verification ◽  
Low Levels

As trust in news media and social media dwindles and fears of disinformation and echo chambers spread, individuals need to find ways to access and assess reliable and trustworthy information. Despite low levels of trust in social media, they are used for accessing political information and news. In this study, we examine the information verification practices of opinion leaders (who consume political information above average and share their opinions on social media above average) and of opinion seekers (who seek out political information from friends and family) to understand similarities and differences in their news media trust, fact-checking behaviors, and likeliness of being caught in echo chambers. Based on a survey of French Internet users ( N = 2,000) we find that not only opinion leaders, but also opinion seekers, have higher rates across all three of these dependent variables. We discuss the implications of findings for the development of opinion leadership theory as well as for social media platforms wishing to increase trust.

scholarly journals Echo Chamber Effect in Rumor Rebuttal Discussions About COVID-19 in China: Social Media Content and Network Analysis Study (Preprint)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dandan Wang ◽  
Yuxing Qian
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Network Analysis ◽  
Information Seeking ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Three Dimensions ◽  
Community Interactions ◽  
Echo Chamber ◽  
Negative Sentiment ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Chamber Effect

BACKGROUND The dissemination of rumor rebuttal content on social media is vital for rumor control and disease containment during public health crises. Previous research on the effectiveness of rumor rebuttal, to a certain extent, ignored or simplified the structure of dissemination networks and users’ cognition as well as decision-making and interaction behaviors. OBJECTIVE This study aimed to roughly evaluate the effectiveness of rumor rebuttal; dig deeply into the attitude-based echo chamber effect on users’ responses to rumor rebuttal under multiple topics on Weibo, a Chinese social media platform, in the early stage of the COVID-19 epidemic; and evaluate the echo chamber’s impact on the information characteristics of user interaction content. METHODS We used Sina Weibo’s application programming interface to crawl rumor rebuttal content related to COVID-19 from 10 AM on January 23, 2020, to midnight on April 8, 2020. Using content analysis, sentiment analysis, social network analysis, and statistical analysis, we first analyzed whether and to what extent there was an echo chamber effect on the shaping of individuals’ attitudes when retweeting or commenting on others’ tweets. Then, we tested the heterogeneity of attitude distribution within communities and the homophily of interactions between communities. Based on the results at user and community levels, we made comprehensive judgments. Finally, we examined users’ interaction content from three dimensions—sentiment expression, information seeking and sharing, and civility—to test the impact of the echo chamber effect. RESULTS Our results indicated that the retweeting mechanism played an essential role in promoting polarization, and the commenting mechanism played a role in consensus building. Our results showed that there might not be a significant echo chamber effect on community interactions and verified that, compared to like-minded interactions, cross-cutting interactions contained significantly more negative sentiment, information seeking and sharing, and incivility. We found that online users’ information-seeking behavior was accompanied by incivility, and information-sharing behavior was accompanied by more negative sentiment, which was often accompanied by incivility. CONCLUSIONS Our findings revealed the existence and degree of an echo chamber effect from multiple dimensions, such as topic, interaction mechanism, and interaction level, and its impact on interaction content. Based on these findings, we provide several suggestions for preventing or alleviating group polarization to achieve better rumor rebuttal.

scholarly journals Estimating the effect size of moral contagion in online networks: A pre-registered replication and meta-analysis

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
William J. Brady ◽  
Jay Joseph Van Bavel
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Effect Size ◽  
Online Social Networks ◽  
Information Diffusion ◽  
Meta Analysis ◽  
Online Information ◽  
Political Messages ◽  
Social Lives ◽  
Social Activists ◽  
Social Media Platforms

Over 4 billion people now use social media platforms. As our social lives become more entangled than ever before with online social networks, it is important to understand the dynamics of online information diffusion. This is particularly true for the political domain, as political elites, disinformation profiteers and social activists all utilize social media to gain influence by spreading information. Recent work found that emotional expressions related to the domain of morality (moral emotion expression) are associated with increased diffusion of political messages--a phenomenon we called ‘moral contagion’. Here, we perform a large, pre-registered direct replication (N = 849,266) of Brady et al. (2017), as well as a meta-analysis of all available data testing moral contagion (5 independent labs, 27 studies, N = 4,821,006). The estimate of moral contagion in the available population of studies is positive and significant (IRR = 1.12, 95% CI = [1.06, 1.19]), such that each message is 12% more likely to be shared for each additional moral-emotional word. The mean effect size of the large, pre-registered replication (IRR = 1.15) better estimated the effect size of the available population of studies than the original study (IRR = 1.20). These findings reinforce the importance of replication and producing a pre-registered analysis to generate accurate estimates of effect size for future studies.

scholarly journals Predictive Analytical Model for Microblogging Data Using Asset Bubble Modelling

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 108-118
Author(s):  
Srinidhi Hiriyannaiah ◽  
Siddesh G.M. ◽  
Srinivasa K.G.
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Information Diffusion ◽  
Predictive Analytics ◽  
Heterogeneous Systems ◽  
Asset Bubble ◽  
Proposed Model ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Types Of Information ◽  
Better Than

In recent days, social media plays a significant role in the ecosystem of the big data world and its different types of information. There is an emerging need for collection, monitoring, analyzing, and visualizing the different information from various social media platforms in different domains like businesses, public administration, and others. Social media acts as the representative with numerous microblogs for analytics. Predictive analytics of such microblogs provides insights into various aspects of the real-world entities. In this article, a predictive model is proposed using the tweets generated on Twitter social media. The proposed model calculates the potential of a topic in the tweets for the prediction purposes. The experiments were conducted on tweets of the regional election in India and the results are better than the existing systems. In the future, the model can be extended for analysis of information diffusion in heterogeneous systems.

Credible to Whom?

2017 ◽  
pp. 142-161
Author(s):  
Nathan Rodriguez
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Search Engine ◽  
Online Search ◽  
Case Study Approach ◽  
Study Approach ◽  
Active Choice ◽  
Echo Chamber ◽  
Chamber Effect

This chapter adopts a case study approach to examine the echo chamber effect online. Individuals cobble together personalized newsfeeds by active choice and those choices are often accompanied by subtle manipulations in social media and online search engine algorithms that may shape and constrain the parameters of information on a given topic. In this chapter, the author studied vaccine-hesitant discourse in an online forum over a five-year period. Those conversations exhibited characteristics of what would be considered an echo chamber, as defined by Jamieson and Cappella (2008). The implications of this case study suggest that the echo chamber within the realm of vaccination can lead individuals toward content and information of dubious veracity, with significant implications for public health.

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