Tweeting From Left to Right

Abstract

We estimated ideological preferences of 3.8 million Twitter users and, using a data set of nearly 150 million tweets concerning 12 political and nonpolitical issues, explored whether online communication resembles an "echo chamber" (as a result of selective exposure and ideological segregation) or a "national conversation." We observed that information was exchanged primarily among individuals with similar ideological preferences in the case of political issues (e.g., 2012 presidential election, 2013 government shutdown) but not many other current events (e.g., 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, 2014 Super Bowl). Discussion of the Newtown shootings in 2012 reflected a dynamic process, beginning as a national conversation before transforming into a polarized exchange. With respect to both political and nonpolitical issues, liberals were more likely than conservatives to engage in cross-ideological dissemination; this is an important asymmetry with respect to the structure of communication that is consistent with psychological theory and research bearing on ideological differences in epistemic, existential, and relational motivation. Overall, we conclude that previous work may have overestimated the degree of ideological segregation in social-media usage.

Partisan selective exposure: The role of party, ideology and ideological extremity over time.

“…The few studies that have examined hypotheses regarding ideology show contradictory results. Some studies show greater PSE among conservatives (Barberá, Jost, Nagler, Tucker, & Bonneau, 2015), yet others among liberals (Bakshy et al, 2015), and some show no ideological differences at all (Himelboim et al, 2013). For example, a series of laboratory studies found no significant differences between conservatives and liberals in the willingness to be exposed to a segment of a cross-ideological news show (Arceneaux et al, 2012), but online experimental studies showed that labeling an online news source as Fox News had a disproportionately stronger attraction for conservatives, than the attraction of the label MSNBC on liberals (Iyengar & Hahn, 2009).…”

“…Even though the nationally representative sampling strategies provide excellent high-quality samples, self-report measures of media consumption can be associated with misestimation of past behaviors or self-presentational concerns. In this perspective, it would be ideal to replicate these findings measuring actual behavior, either in experimental studies (Arceneaux et al, 2012;Garrett & Stroud, 2014) or using big data methods (e.g., Bakshy et al, 2015;Barberá et al 2015).…”

Civility vs. Incivility in Online Social Interactions: An Evolutionary Approach

“…In these settings, SNS users can randomly interact with strangers who subscribed to the same feed. Even if subscribers may have specific interests in common, they are likely to be heterogeneous in terms of personal traits, preferences, and modes of social interaction ([6]–[8]).…”

(Alternative) Media Sources in AfD-centered Facebook Discussions

“…The recorded activities also include clicks on links to (alternative) media sources. Claims of social media filter bubbles and echo chambers are supported by empirical studies on political follower networks on Twitter (e.g., Barberá et al, 2015;Colleoni et al, 2014) as well as ideological communities (Del Vicario et al, 2016) and news page use (Schmidt et al, 2017) on Facebook. Alternative media outlets, which can be considered niche sources from a general audience perspective, may well be important sources within certain filter bubbles and echo chambers.…”