Echo chambers

2019 ◽  
pp. 96-116
Author(s):  
Alberto Acerbi
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Evolutionary Approach ◽  
Online Information ◽  
Broad Perspective ◽  
Echo Chambers

In this chapter, the focus is on the phenomenon of online echo chambers, trying an evaluation from the broad perspective of cultural evolution. It has been noted that individuals associate on social media in communities of like-minded people, where they are repeatedly exposed to the same kind of information and, even more importantly, they are not exposed to contrary information. How strong are echo chambers? What are their effects on the flow of online information? Although the formation and existence of echo chambers is consistent with the cognitive and evolutionary approach defended here, individuals are exposed online to a considerable amount of contrary opinions: in fact, against current common sense, to more diverse opinions than what happens in their offline life. As a consequence, the increase of polarization, which many link to a more informationally segregated society, could also have been overestimated, or, in any case, may be due to motifs other than our social media activity.

Epilogue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert E. Goodin ◽  
Kai Spiekermann
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
European Union ◽  
Majority Rule ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
Epistemic Democracy ◽  
The Core ◽  
Echo Chambers ◽  
Filter Bubbles

This chapter reflects on the election of Donald Trump and the vote of the British electorate in favour of ‘Brexit’ from the European Union. While we refrain from judging the outcomes of these votes, we do discuss concerns pertaining to the lack of truthfulness in both campaigns. After rehearsing the lies on which the Trump and Brexit campaigns were based, we consider different explanations as to why these campaigns were nevertheless successful, and where this leaves the argument for epistemic democracy. Particularly worrisome are tendencies towards ‘epistemic insouciance’, ‘epistemic malevolence’, and ‘epistemic agnosticism’. We also consider the problematic influence of social media in terms of echo chambers and filter bubbles. The core argument in favour of epistemic democracy is that the pooling of votes by majority rule has epistemically beneficial properties, assuming certain conditions. If these assumptions are not met, or are systematically corrupted, then epistemic democracy is under threat.

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.

Attributions for Inconsistencies Between Online and Offline Self-Presentations

2011 ◽  
Vol 38 (6) ◽  
pp. 805-825 ◽  
Author(s):  
David C. DeAndrea ◽  
Joseph B. Walther
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Online Information ◽  
Interpersonal Interactions ◽  
Online Behavior ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Self Presentations ◽  
Interpersonal Impressions

This study investigated how people make sense of self-portrayals in social media that are inconsistent with impressions formed through other interpersonal interactions. The research focused on how inconsistent online information affects interpersonal impressions and how motivation to manage impressions influences the types of attributions that actors and observers make for the misleading online behavior. Results show that the relationship between observer and the target influences evaluations of online/offline inconsistencies: Subjects rated the inconsistencies of acquaintances as more intentionally misleading, more hypocritical, and less trustworthy relative to the inconsistencies of friends. In addition, the types of attributions people made for online behavior depended on the perspective of the person providing the explanation: People explained their own online behavior more favorably than the online behavior of both friends and acquaintances.

scholarly journals Internet Users Engage More With Phatic Posts Than With Health Misinformation On Facebook

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manon Berriche ◽  
Sacha Altay
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Negative Emotions ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Emotional Valence ◽  
Real World Data ◽  
Internet Users ◽  
Depth Analysis ◽  
Evolution Dynamics

Social media like Facebook are harshly criticized for the propagation of health misinformation. Yet, little research has provided in-depth analysis of real-world data to measure the extent to which Internet users engage with it. This article examines 6.5 million interactions generated by 500 posts on an emblematic case of online health misinformation: the Facebook page Santé + Mag, which generates five times more interactions than the combination of the five best-established French media outlets. Based on the literature on cultural evolution, we tested whether the presence of cognitive factors of attraction, that tap into evolved cognitive preferences, such as information related to sexuality, social relations, threat, disgust or negative emotions, could explain the success of Santé + Mag’s posts. Drawing from media studies findings, we hypothesized that their popularity could be driven by Internet users’ desire to interact with their friends and family by sharing phatic posts (i.e. statements with no practical information fulfilling a social function such as “hello” or “sister, I love you”).We found that phatic posts were the strongest predictor of interactions, followed by posts with a positive emotional valence. While 50% of the posts were related to social relations, only 28% consisted of health misinformation. Despite its cognitive appeal, health misinformation was a negative predictor of interactions. Sexual contents negatively predicted interactions and other factors of attraction such as disgust, threat or negative emotions did not predict interactions. These results strengthen the idea that Facebook is first and foremost a social network used by people to foster their social relations, not to spread online misinformation. We encourage researchers working on misinformation to conduct finer-grained analysis of online contents and to adopt interdisciplinary approach to study the phatic dimension of communication, together with positive contents, to better understand the cultural evolution dynamics of social media.

scholarly journals THE ROLE OF INSTAGRAM AS AN INFORMATION DELIVERANCE TO THE CITIZEN BY THE PUBLIC RELATIONS OF SALATIGA CITY GOVERNMENT

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 111
Author(s):  
Silvia Widya Kusumaningtyas ◽  
Zon Vanel
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Public Relations ◽  
Active Role ◽  
City Government ◽  
Online Information ◽  
The Public ◽  
Information Media ◽  
Government Public Relations ◽  
The Government

<span lang="IN">Social media is one type of new media that facilitates the process of communication among human. Social media makes it easy for users to communicate and share information in a wider range. At present, not only people use Instagram, but the government also needs to keep up with the time to participate in using Instagram as an online information media. Public Relations of the Salatiga Government is one of the public relations departments that uses Instagram as an online information media to provide information needed by the community.<br /> This research aimed to find out how the content of the information was<span>  </span>and how the role of instagram was as an information deliverance to the citizen by the public relations of Salatiga. Through qualitative methods research, data is collected by means of interviews and observations. The results showed that the Salatiga <span> </span>Government Public Relations Instagram account had a role to increase brand awareness, connect many people and as a source of information/ business promotion.Public Relations of the Salatiga Government considers that Instagram plays an active role in conveying information to the public. This is seen from the many positive responses received by the Salatiga City Government Public Relations during managing Instagram as a modern information deliverance.<span>     </span></span>

scholarly journals Network structure and patterns of information diversity on Twitter

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Conan Shore ◽  
Jiye Baek ◽  
Chrysanthos Dellarocas
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Information Sharing ◽  
Cross Section ◽  
Network Structure ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
News Sources ◽  
Echo Chambers ◽  
Information Diversity

Social media have great potential to support diverse information sharing, but there is widespread concern that platforms like Twitter do not result in communication between those who hold contradictory viewpoints. Because users can choose whom to follow, prior research suggests that social media users exist in "echo chambers" or become polarized. We seek evidence of this in a complete cross section of hyperlinks posted on Twitter, using previously validated measures of the political slant of news sources to study information diversity. Contrary to prediction, we find that the average account posts links to more politically moderate news sources than the ones they receive in their own feed. However, members of a tiny network core do exhibit cross-sectional evidence of polarization and are responsible for the majority of tweets received overall due to their popularity and activity, which could explain the widespread perception of polarization on social media.

Adversarial Cross-domain Community Question Retrieval

2022 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Aibo Guo ◽  
Xinyi Li ◽  
Ning Pang ◽  
Xiang Zhao
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Information Sharing ◽  
Information Access ◽  
Professional Knowledge ◽  
Feature Space ◽  
Online Information ◽  
Cross Domain ◽  
Adversarial Training ◽  
Sentence Matching ◽  
Target Data

Community Q&A forum is a special type of social media that provides a platform to raise questions and to answer them (both by forum participants), to facilitate online information sharing. Currently, community Q&A forums in professional domains have attracted a large number of users by offering professional knowledge. To support information access and save users’ efforts of raising new questions, they usually come with a question retrieval function, which retrieves similar existing questions (and their answers) to a user’s query. However, it can be difficult for community Q&A forums to cover all domains, especially those emerging lately with little labeled data but great discrepancy from existing domains. We refer to this scenario as cross-domain question retrieval. To handle the unique challenges of cross-domain question retrieval, we design a model based on adversarial training, namely, X-QR , which consists of two modules—a domain discriminator and a sentence matcher. The domain discriminator aims at aligning the source and target data distributions and unifying the feature space by domain-adversarial training. With the assistance of the domain discriminator, the sentence matcher is able to learn domain-consistent knowledge for the final matching prediction. To the best of our knowledge, this work is among the first to investigate the domain adaption problem of sentence matching for community Q&A forums question retrieval. The experiment results suggest that the proposed X-QR model offers better performance than conventional sentence matching methods in accomplishing cross-domain community Q&A tasks.

Raising Awareness About Public Archives in East and Southern Africa Through Social Media

2019 ◽  
pp. 160-181 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nampombe Saurombe
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
Research Strategy ◽  
Online Information ◽  
Civic Duty ◽  
Raising Awareness ◽  
National Archives ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Public Archives ◽  
Southern Regional

Archives serve as society's collective memory because they provide evidence of the past as well as promoting accountability and transparency of past actions. Appreciation of the archives should therefore result in citizens linking these records with their identity, history, civic duty and cultural heritage. However, research in east and southern Africa seems to indicate that very few citizens are aware of and use the archives. Social media platforms have been utilized to raise awareness about the archival institutions elsewhere. This study sought to find out whether the National Archives in east and southern Africa used social media to raise awareness about archives. The study involved 12 national archives affiliated to the East and Southern Regional Branch of the International Council on Archives (ESARBICA) using a multi-method research strategy. The findings indicated that social media platforms were not a preferred option in outreach strategies, even though they were recognized as useful means to reach online information seekers.

The Search and Purchase Process among E-Travel Customers

2012 ◽  
pp. 514-524
Author(s):  
Maria Lexhagen
Keyword(s):  
Information Technology ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Mobile Technology ◽  
Information Search ◽  
Media Use ◽  
Customer Behavior ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Online Information ◽  
Future Developments ◽  
Purchase Process

Tourism is an intangible product that is simultaneously produced and consumed as well as perishable. Therefore, it is highly dependent on the availability of information. Information Technology, such as the Internet, can support customers’ search and purchase processes and act as a source and facilitator to achieve higher efficiency, less risk, and more satisfied tourists. This chapter reviews the emergence and growth of research on tourists’ online information search and purchase, the need for and use of support in this process, as well as the perception of values. Future developments of mobile technology and social media use are discussed as interesting areas of more research since they have implications for customer behavior, marketing, and management.

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