The echo chamber effect on social media.
echo chambers
information spreading
polarization
social media
Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
ISSN: 1091-6490
Titre abrégé: Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A
Pays: United States
ID NLM: 7505876
Informations de publication
Date de publication:
02 03 2021
02 03 2021
Historique:
entrez:
24
2
2021
pubmed:
25
2
2021
medline:
5
8
2021
Statut:
ppublish
Résumé
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.
Identifiants
pubmed: 33622786
pii: 2023301118
doi: 10.1073/pnas.2023301118
pmc: PMC7936330
pii:
doi:
Types de publication
Journal Article
Langues
eng
Sous-ensembles de citation
IM
Informations de copyright
Copyright © 2021 the Author(s). Published by PNAS.
Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts
The authors declare no competing interest.
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