scholarly journals Echo Chambers

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Anthony Cookson ◽  
Joseph E. Engelberg ◽  
William Mullins
Keyword(s):  
Social Network ◽  
Trading Volume ◽  
Selective Exposure ◽  
Earnings Announcement ◽  
Echo Chambers ◽  
Echo Chamber

We find evidence of selective exposure to confirmatory information among 300,000 users on the investor social network StockTwits. Self-described bulls are 5 times more likely to follow a user with a bullish view of the same stock than self-described bears. This tendency is strong even among professional investors and is more pronounced on earnings announcement days. Placing oneself in an information “echo chamber” generates significant differences in the newsfeeds of bulls and bears: over a 50-day period, a bull will see 70 more bullish messages and 15 fewer bearish messages than a bear over the same period. Selective exposure creates “information silos” in which the diversity of received signals is high across users' newsfeeds but is low within users' newsfeeds. Finally, we show that this siloing of information is positively related to trading volume.

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.

scholarly journals Cascades across networks are sufficient for the formation of echo chambers: An agent-based model

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan-Philipp Fränken ◽  
Toby Pilditch
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Social Networks ◽  
Social Network ◽  
Individual Differences ◽  
Peer To Peer ◽  
Psychological Explanation ◽  
Agent Based ◽  
Echo Chambers ◽  
Core Components ◽  
Echo Chamber

Investigating how echo chambers emerge in social networks is increasingly crucial, given their role in facilitating the retention of misinformation, inducing intolerance towards opposing views, and misleading public and political discourse (e.g., disbelief in climate change). Previously, the emergence of echo chambers has been attributed to psychological biases and inter-individual differences, requiring repeated interactions among network-users. In the present work we show that two core components of social networks—users self-select their networks, and information is shared laterally (i.e. peer-to-peer)—are causally sufficient to produce echo chambers. Crucially, we show that this requires neither special psychological explanation (e.g., bias or individual differences), nor repeated interactions—though these may be exacerbating factors. In fact, this effect is made increasingly worse the more generations of peer-to-peer transmissions it takes for information to permeate a network. This raises important questions for social network architects, if truly opposed to the increasing prevalence of deleterious societal trends that stem from echo chamber formation.

scholarly journals Recursive patterns in online echo chambers

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Emanuele Brugnoli ◽  
Matteo Cinelli ◽  
Walter Quattrociocchi ◽  
Antonio Scala
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Peer Influence ◽  
Confirmation Bias ◽  
Selective Exposure ◽  
User Engagement ◽  
Informational Cascades ◽  
Common System ◽  
Time Aggregation ◽  
Echo Chambers ◽  
Echo Chamber

AbstractDespite their entertainment oriented purpose, social media changed the way users access information, debate, and form their opinions. Recent studies, indeed, showed that users online tend to promote their favored narratives and thus to form polarized groups around a common system of beliefs. Confirmation bias helps to account for users’ decisions about whether to spread content, thus creating informational cascades within identifiable communities. At the same time, aggregation of favored information within those communities reinforces selective exposure and group polarization. Along this path, through a thorough quantitative analysis we approach connectivity patterns of 1.2 M Facebook users engaged with two very conflicting narratives: scientific and conspiracy news. Analyzing such data, we quantitatively investigate the effect of two mechanisms (namely challenge avoidance and reinforcement seeking) behind confirmation bias, one of the major drivers of human behavior in social media. We find that challenge avoidance mechanism triggers the emergence of two distinct and polarized groups of users (i.e., echo chambers) who also tend to be surrounded by friends having similar systems of beliefs. Through a network based approach, we show how the reinforcement seeking mechanism limits the influence of neighbors and primarily drives the selection and diffusion of contents even among like-minded users, thus fostering the formation of highly polarized sub-clusters within the same echo chamber. Finally, we show that polarized users reinforce their preexisting beliefs by leveraging the activity of their like-minded neighbors, and this trend grows with the user engagement suggesting how peer influence acts as a support for reinforcement seeking.

Ideology, communication and polarization

2021 ◽  
Vol 376 (1822) ◽  
pp. 20200133
Author(s):  
Yoshihisa Kashima ◽  
Andrew Perfors ◽  
Vanessa Ferdinand ◽  
Elle Pattenden
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Social Network ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Network Dynamics ◽  
Political Polarization ◽  
Connectionist Model ◽  
Theme Issue ◽  
Social Network Dynamics ◽  
Dynamic Social Networks ◽  
Echo Chamber

Ideologically committed minds form the basis of political polarization, but ideologically guided communication can further entrench and exacerbate polarization depending on the structures of ideologies and social network dynamics on which cognition and communication operate. Combining a well-established connectionist model of cognition and a well-validated computational model of social influence dynamics on social networks, we develop a new model of ideological cognition and communication on dynamic social networks and explore its implications for ideological political discourse. In particular, we explicitly model ideologically filtered interpretation of social information, ideological commitment to initial opinion, and communication on dynamically evolving social networks, and examine how these factors combine to generate ideologically divergent and polarized political discourse. The results show that ideological interpretation and commitment tend towards polarized discourse. Nonetheless, communication and social network dynamics accelerate and amplify polarization. Furthermore, when agents sever social ties with those that disagree with them (i.e. structure their social networks by homophily), even non-ideological agents may form an echo chamber and form a cluster of opinions that resemble an ideological group. This article is part of the theme issue ‘The political brain: neurocognitive and computational mechanisms’.

The paradox of pluralism: A key to interpreting the online public sphere in the time of ‘encastellation’

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriele Giacomini
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Political System ◽  
Selective Exposure ◽  
The Internet ◽  
New Concepts ◽  
Echo Chambers ◽  
Filter Bubbles

This viewpoint makes a theoretical effort to label the organization of the virtual sphere under new concepts: ‘encastellation’ and the ‘paradox of pluralism’. The former is a metaphorical synthesis of already-known concepts (selective exposure, polarization, homophily, echo chambers and filter bubbles). In the second case, we emphasize the existence of a ‘paradox of online pluralism’: the internet has increased the possibility for everyone to make their voice heard (in quantitative terms), but at the same time it appears to also be increasing the distance between voices, putting in jeopardy the achievement of the aims of the pluralist political system (in qualitative terms). In conclusion, we express doubts about the feasibility of the deliberative vision of democracy in the current virtual sphere.

scholarly journals Echo chamber and trench warfare dynamics in online debates

2017 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 257-273 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rune Karlsen ◽  
Kari Steen-Johnsen ◽  
Dag Wollebæk ◽  
Bernard Enjolras
Keyword(s):  
Online Survey ◽  
Experimental Approach ◽  
Online Discussion ◽  
Collective Learning ◽  
Survey Experiments ◽  
Echo Chambers ◽  
Echo Chamber ◽  
Trench Warfare

In this article, we take issue with the claim by Sunstein and others that online discussion takes place in echo chambers, and suggest that the dynamics of online debates could be more aptly described by the logic of ‘trench warfare’, in which opinions are reinforced through contradiction as well as confirmation. We use a unique online survey and an experimental approach to investigate and test echo chamber and trench warfare dynamics in online debates. The results show that people do indeed claim to discuss with those who hold opposite views from themselves. Furthermore, our survey experiments suggest that both confirming and contradicting arguments have similar effects on attitude reinforcement. Together, this indicates that both echo chamber and trench warfare dynamics – a situation where attitudes are reinforced through both confirmation and disconfirmation biases – characterize online debates. However, we also find that two-sided neutral arguments have weaker effects on reinforcement than one-sided confirming and contradicting arguments, suggesting that online debates could contribute to collective learning and qualification of arguments.

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.

scholarly journals The Earnings Announcement Premium and Trading Volume

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Owen Lamont ◽  
Andrea Frazzini
Keyword(s):  
Trading Volume ◽  
Earnings Announcement

scholarly journals Quarterly Earnings Announcement Effect on Stock Return and Trading Volume in Nepal

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 32-47
Author(s):  
Jeetendra Dangol ◽  
Ajay Bhandari
Keyword(s):  
Stock Market ◽  
Stock Returns ◽  
Trading Volume ◽  
Earnings Announcements ◽  
Good News ◽  
Fiscal Year ◽  
Event Analysis ◽  
Earnings Announcement ◽  
Quarterly Earnings ◽  
Analysis Methodology

The study examines the stock returns and trading volume reaction to quarterly earnings announcements using the event analysis methodology. Ten commercial banks with 313 earnings announcements are considered between the fiscal year 2010/11 and 2017/18. The observations are portioned into 225 earning-increased (good-news) sub-samples and 88 earning-decreased (bad-news) sub-samples. This paper finds that the Nepalese stock market is inefficient at a semi-strong level, but there is a strong linkage between quarterly earnings announcement and trading volume. Similarly, the study provides evidence of existence of information content hypothesis in the Nepalese stock market.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document