The echo chamber is overstated: the moderating effect of political interest and diverse media

Dubois, Elizabeth; Blank, Grant

doi:10.1080/1369118x.2018.1428656

Cited by 692 publications

(453 citation statements)

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“…Some research has indicated that social media may lead to selective exposure to specific types of content, driving possible "echo chambers" and the formation of homogenous clusters is a primary driver of information diffusion [15]. Other studies assessing this phenomenon note, however, that echo chambers may not be as present depending on how diverse exposure is to different forms of media [16]. False information can spread easily over social media platforms.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Misinformation and the US Ebola communication crisis: analyzing the veracity and content of social media messages related to a fear-inducing infectious disease outbreak

2020

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Background The Ebola communication crisis of 2014 generated widespread fear and attention among Western news media, social media users, and members of the United States (US) public. Health communicators need more information on misinformation and the social media environment during a fear-inducing disease outbreak to improve communication practices. The purpose of this study was to describe the content of Ebola-related tweets with a specific focus on misinformation, political content, health related content, risk framing, and rumors. Methods We examined tweets from a random 1% sample of all tweets published September 30th - October 30th, 2014, filtered for English-language tweets mentioning “Ebola” in the content or hashtag, that had at least 1 retweet (N = 72,775 tweets). A randomly selected subset of 3639 (5%) tweets were evaluated for inclusion. We analyzed the 3113 tweets that meet inclusion criteria using public health trained human coders to assess tweet characteristics (joke, opinion, discord), veracity (true, false, partially false), political context, risk frame, health context, Ebola specific messages, and rumors. We assessed the proportion of tweets with specific content using descriptive statistics and chi-squared tests. Results Of non-joke tweets, 10% of Ebola-related tweets contained false or partially false information. Twenty-five percent were related to politics, 28% contained content that provoked reader response or promoted discord, 42% contained risk elevating messages and 72% were related to health. The most frequent rumor mentioned focused on government conspiracy. When comparing tweets with true information to tweets with misinformation, a greater percentage of tweets with misinformation were political in nature (36% vs 15%) and contained discord-inducing statements (45% vs 10%). Discord-inducing statements and political messages were both significantly more common in tweets containing misinformation compared with those without(p < 0.001). Conclusions Results highlight the importance of anticipating politicization of disease outbreaks, and the need for policy makers and social media companies to build partnerships and develop response frameworks in advance of an event. While each public health event is different, our findings provide insight into the possible social media environment during a future epidemic and could help optimize potential public health communication strategies.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Misinformation and the US Ebola communication crisis: analyzing the veracity and content of social media messages related to a fear-inducing infectious disease outbreak

2020

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“…On the other hand, it has been pointed out that people who want to discuss politics may seek confrontation via opposing views just as much as they seek confirmation, which may create dynamics of "trench warfare," rather than "echo chambers" (Karlsen, Steen-Johnsen, Wollebaek, & Enjolras, 2017). Patterns of interaction have also been shown to depend upon the topics of discussion (Barberá, Jost, Nagler, Tucker, & Bonneau, 2015;Dubois & Blank, 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Anger, Fear, and Echo Chambers: The Emotional Basis for Online Behavior

Wollebæk

Karlsen

Steen‐Johnsen

et al. 2019

Social Media + Society

108

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Emotions, such as anger and fear, have been shown to influence people’s political behavior. However, few studies link emotions specifically to how people debate political issues and seek political information online. In this article, we examine how anger and fear are related to politics-oriented digital behavior, attempting to bridge the gap between the thus far disconnected literature on political psychology and the digital media. Based on survey data, we show that anger and fear are connected to distinct behaviors online. Angry people are more likely to engage in debates with people having both similar and opposing views. They also seek out information confirming their views more frequently. Anxious individuals, by contrast, tend to seek out information contradicting their opinions. These findings reiterate predictions made in the extant literature concerning the role of emotions in politics. Thus, we argue that anger reinforces echo chamber dynamics and trench warfare dynamics in the digital public sphere, while fear counteracts these dynamics.

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“…Echo chambers have been shown to pervade the offline realm [15], to be related to the spreading of misinformation [16,17], or * Corresponding author: michele.starnini@gmail.com the development of ideological radicalism [18]. Recent studies, however, have challenged the impact of echo chambers and partisan segregation in communication networks over online social media [19,20].…”

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confidence: 99%

Quantifying echo chamber effects in information spreading over political communication networks

et al. 2019

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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. In this paper, we gauge the effects of echo chambers in information spreading phenomena over political communication networks. 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. We define a continuous political position parameter, independent of the network's structure, that allows to quantify the presence of echo chambers in the strongly connected component of the network, reflected in two well-separated communities of similar sizes with opposite views of the impeachment process. By means of simple spreading models, we show that the capability of users in propagating the content they produce, measured by the associated spreadability, strongly depends on their attitude. Users expressing pro-impeachment sentiments are capable to transmit information, on average, to a larger audience than users expressing anti-impeachment sentiments. Furthermore, the users' spreadability is correlated to the diversity, in terms of political position, of the audience reached. Our method can be exploited to identify the presence of echo chambers and their effects across different contexts and shed light upon the mechanisms allowing to break echo chambers.

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The echo chamber is overstated: the moderating effect of political interest and diverse media

Cited by 692 publications

References 36 publications

Misinformation and the US Ebola communication crisis: analyzing the veracity and content of social media messages related to a fear-inducing infectious disease outbreak

Misinformation and the US Ebola communication crisis: analyzing the veracity and content of social media messages related to a fear-inducing infectious disease outbreak

Anger, Fear, and Echo Chambers: The Emotional Basis for Online Behavior

Quantifying echo chamber effects in information spreading over political communication networks

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