Invisible Audience and Echo Chamber Effects

Developing a theory for the remote audiences of digital networks, we dialogue with social psychology and social theory to describe a novel form of communication that is delivered to everyone and no one at the same time. This is the invisible audience. At the same time as people express themselves to a generalized, invisible audience over social media, the ‘everyone’ of this invisible audience is often narrowed in a very specific way: echo chamber effects. The invisible audience and echo chamber effects both reinforce a solipsistic horizon for every person, and these individual horizons come partially together under echo chamber effects, constituting a multiplicity of separate ‘homophilic assemblages’ characterized by normative and political alignment, one-dimensional communication, and black-and-white thinking. We call this a ‘splitting public sphere’. On the whole, rational debate is curtailed, under the reign of soundbites, memes, and angry venting. The lack of exposure to reasoned disagreement makes people more susceptible to authoritarian rhetoric and propaganda.

The Society of the Selfie: Social Media and the Crisis of Liberal Democracy

This book explores how the Internet is connected to the global crisis of liberal democracy. Today, self-promotion is at the heart of many human relationships. The selfie is not just a social media gesture people love to hate. It is also a symbol of social reality in the age of the Internet. Through social media people have new ways of rating and judging themselves and one another, via metrics such as likes, shares, followers and friends. There are new thirsts for authenticity, outlets for verbal aggression, and social problems. Social media culture and neoliberalism dovetail and amplify one another, feeding social estrangement. With neoliberalism, psychosocial wounds are agitated and authoritarianism is provoked. Yet this new sociality also inspires resistance and political mobilisation. Illustrating ideas and trends with examples from news and popular culture, the book outlines and applies theories from Debord, Foucault, Fromm, Goffman, and Giddens, among others. Topics covered include the global history of communication technologies, personal branding, echo chamber effects, alienation and fear of abnormality. Information technologies provide channels for public engagement where extreme ideas reach farther and faster than ever before, and political differences are widened and inflamed. They also provide new opportunities for protest and resistance.

Fuelling the Subsidized Public

Background: This article explores the Facebook communications of Canadian oil and gas advocacy organizations, including industry-funded and nominally independent groups. Analysis: These groups are analyzed as producers of “subsidized publics,” with elites providing supporters with resources that enable them to take political action on industry’s behalf. A social network analysis maps how they link supporters with information from diverse sources, constructing networked publics whose members can recirculate pro-industry talking points. Conclusions and implications: These communications enact powerful forms of network-making power, programming an interconnected echo chamber that interfaces supporters with material from neoliberal extractivist discourse coalitions—networks of industry advocates that industry has itself helped cultivate over decades. Contexte : Cet article explore les communications sur Facebook faites par des organismes soutenant l’industrie pétrolière au Canada, y compris des groupes financés par l’industrie elle-même et des groupes prétendument indépendants. Analyse : L’article analyse ces groupes en tant qu’engendreurs de « publics subventionnés », où une élite accorde des ressources à des partisans de l’industrie afin qu’ils s’engagent politiquement pour le compte de celle-ci. Une analyse des réseaux sociaux montre comment ces partisans fournissent de l’information provenant de sources différentes à un public favorable à l’industrie pétrolière, créant ainsi des réseaux dont les membres peuvent à leur tour rediffuser des éléments de langage appuyant l’industrie. Conclusions and implications: Les communications de ces partisans sont puissantes dans leur capacité à former des réseaux, encourageant des échanges en vase clos qui exposent les participants à des informations provenant de coalitions d’extractivistes néolibéraux. Quant à ces derniers, c’est l’industrie elle-même qui a cultivé leurs opinions pendant des décennies.

How Do Individuals in a Radical Echo Chamber React to Opposing Views? Evidence from a Content Analysis of Stormfront

Calls to “break up” radical echo chambers by injecting them with alternative viewpoints are common. Yet, thus far there is little evidence about the impact of such counter-messaging. To what extent and how do individuals who inhabit a radical echo chamber engage with messages that challenge their core beliefs? Drawing on data from the radical right forum Stormfront we address this question with a large-scale content and longitudinal analysis of users’ posting behavior, which analyses more than 35,000 English language contributions to the forum spanning 2011 through 2013. Our findings show that engaging with oppositional views is actually a core practice among Stromfront users which invites active participation and encourages engagement. Indeed, many “echoes” in the echo chamber we studied were not core beliefs being restated, but the sound of opposing viewpoints being undermined and marginalized. These findings underscore the limited potential for counter-messages to undermine radical echo chambers.

Worrying Impact of Artificial Intelligence and Big Data Through the Prism of Recommender Systems

Transfer from social to semantic web brought us to an era of algorithmic society, placing issues such as privacy, big data and AI in the spotlight. although neutral by their nature, the power of big data algorithms to impact societies became major concern outcoming with fines issued to Facebook in the US. These events were initiated by alleged breaches of data privacy connected to recommender system technology, which can provide individualized content to internet users. This paper seeks to explain recommender systems, while elaborating on their social effects, to conclude that their overall impacts might be increase in retail sales, democratization of advertising, increase in internet addictions, social polarization (echo chamber issue), and improvement of political communication. Also, more research should be deployed into low intensity addictions, as potential outcome of recommender systems, and it should be explored how they affect political participation and democracy.

Dynamics of online hate and misinformation

Online debates are often characterised by extreme polarisation and heated discussions among users. The presence of hate speech online is becoming increasingly problematic, making necessary the development of appropriate countermeasures. In this work, we perform hate speech detection on a corpus of more than one million comments on YouTube videos through a machine learning model, trained and fine-tuned on a large set of hand-annotated data. Our analysis shows that there is no evidence of the presence of “pure haters”, meant as active users posting exclusively hateful comments. Moreover, coherently with the echo chamber hypothesis, we find that users skewed towards one of the two categories of video channels (questionable, reliable) are more prone to use inappropriate, violent, or hateful language within their opponents’ community. Interestingly, users loyal to reliable sources use on average a more toxic language than their counterpart. Finally, we find that the overall toxicity of the discussion increases with its length, measured both in terms of the number of comments and time. Our results show that, coherently with Godwin’s law, online debates tend to degenerate towards increasingly toxic exchanges of views.