Furthermore, the users’ spreading capacity is correlated to the diversity, in terms of political position, of the audience reached. Users expressing pro-impeachment leanings are capable to transmit information, on average, to a larger audience than users expressing anti-impeachment leanings. By means of simple spreading models, we show that the capability of users in propagating the content they produce, measured by the associated spreading capacity, strongly depends on their attitude. These are reflected in two well-separated communities of similar sizes with opposite views of the impeachment process. We define a continuous political leaning parameter, independent of the network’s structure, that allows to quantify the presence of echo chambers in the strongly connected component of the network. Mining 12 million Twitter messages, we reconstruct a network in which users interchange opinions related to the impeachment of the former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. In this paper, we gauge the effects of echo chambers in information spreading phenomena over political communication networks.
#Get into the echo camber strike driver#
the tendency of users to consume information adhering to their preferred narratives-could be a major driver in their consumption patterns.Ībstract Echo chambers in online social networks, in which users prefer to interact only with ideologically-aligned peers, are believed to facilitate misinformation spreading and contribute to radicalize political discourse. Our findings suggest that segregation of users in echo chambers might be an emerging effect of users’ activity on social media and that selective exposure-i.e. Finally, we introduce a taxonomy accounting for users’ behaviour to distinguish between patterns of selective exposure and interest. On the other hand, users tend to interact with almost all the topics presented by their favoured pages. On the one hand, we find that, independently of their activity, users show a tendency to follow a very limited number of pages. In particular, we explore how users distribute their activity across news pages and topics. In this paper, we quantitatively analyse users’ attention economy in news consumption on social media by analysing 14 million users interacting with 583 news outlets (pages) on Facebook over a time span of six years. Furthermore, recent studies have shown that online users are more likely to ignore dissenting information, choosing instead to interact with information adhering to their own point of view. Indeed, despite the unprecedented amount of information we can access online, our attention span still remains limited. Similar cognitive constraints emerge in several aspects of our daily life, from our mobility to the way we communicate, and might even affect the way we consume information online. The social brain hypothesis approximates the total number of social relationships we are able to maintain at 150. Again, we find support for the hypothesis that platforms implementing news feed algorithms like Facebook may elicit the emergence of echo-chambers. Finally, we test the role of the social media platform on news consumption by comparing Reddit and Facebook. Indeed, while Facebook and Twitter present clear-cut echo chambers in all the observed dataset, Reddit and Gab do not. We find peculiar differences across social media. Our method quantifies the existence of echo-chambers along two main dimensions: homophily in the interaction networks and bias in the information diffusion toward likely-minded peers. We infer the leaning of users about controversial topics - ranging from vaccines to abortion - and reconstruct their interaction networks by analyzing different features, such as shared links domain, followed pages, follower relationship and commented posts. To shed light on this issue, we introduce an operational definition of echo chambers and perform a massive comparative analysis on more than 1B pieces of contents produced by 1M users on four social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Gab. Although a quantitative methodology for their identification is still missing, the phenomenon of echo chambers is widely debated both at scientific and political level. Recent studies have shown that online users tend to select information adhering to their system of beliefs, ignore information that does not, and join groups - i.e., echo chambers - around a shared narrative.
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