The echo chamber effect on social media

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.

A Network Analysis of Twitter Interactions by Members of the U.S. Congress

Usage of Twitter by politicians has become more prevalent in recent years, with a goal of influencing the electorate and public perception. We collect, explore, and analyze over 12 years of public Twitter interactions of U.S. senators and representatives. Using community detection algorithms on these interaction networks, and without considering the content of the tweets, we are able to infer the political affiliation of each member of Congress with up to 98.8% accuracy in the House and 94.1% accuracy in the Senate. In addition, we define two metrics that can determine the political ideology of members of Congress achieving a very high Spearman’s rank correlation of 0.86 with the existing DW-NOMINATE score from the field of political science. Finally, we expand our structural analysis to intra-party factions and found evidence that some factions act on Twitter more cohesively than others, suggesting an increasing risk of an echo chamber effect when promoting their political agenda.

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

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.

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

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.

Not quite an echo chamber: ethnic debate on Ethiopian Facebook pages during times of unrest

Social media commonly function as alternative channels for debate in controlled media societies, often supported by the digital diaspora. This study takes a closer look at Ethiopia, where communication traditionally has been controlled by the government. The situation was particularly tense between 2016 and 2017, when a state of emergency act was declared following anti-government protests. The study scrutinizes three of the most popular online channels during the unrest (Ethiopian DJ, Mereja.com and Zehabesha), all of which used Facebook as their primary means of communication. The findings show that the stories posted by the sites were overwhelmingly political, with a particular focus on ethnic issues. Reader reactions show a slightly different pattern, concentrating less on politics and more on society and culture. This could be an expression of felt anxiety among the public due to the tense political situation. Interestingly, when users did comment on ethnic issues, they were not in agreement, but debated the issues intensely and fiercely. A diversity of views was represented. The study concludes that an echo chamber effect was not detected. For lack of appropriate channels for public discussion in the mainstream media, Facebook accommodated a space for political exchange during the state of emergency.