Suchergebnisse

Abstract
Echo chambers, i.e. clusters of users exposed to news and opinions in line with their previous beliefs, were observed in many online debates on social platforms. We propose a completely unbiased entropy-based method for detecting echo chambers. The method is completely agnostic to the nature of the data. In the Italian Twitter debate about the Covid-19 vaccination, we find a limited presence of users in echo chambers (about 0.35% of all users). Nevertheless, their impact on the formation of a common discourse is strong, as users in echo chambers are responsible for nearly a third of the retweets in the original dataset. Moreover, in the case study observed, echo chambers appear to be a receptacle for disinformative content.

AbstractPeople are often more influenced by opinions similar to their own and even seek information from those with whom they expect to most agree—behaviours often attributed to irrational biases. In this paper, I argue that these behaviours can be understood within the context of rational social learning by accounting for the presence of unobserved heterogeneity in preferences or priors. Individuals display local learning by placing greater weight on opinions that are closer to their own. When individuals choose whom to learn from, local learning leads to the development of echo chambers.

This study explores the phenomena of group polarization and echo chambers within the context of online discussions among immigrants in Japan, also known as gaijins, specifically within the #GaijinTwitter community. By analyzing the key topics discussed by divergent groups of Twitter users and examining their interactions through qualitative and quantitative approaches, we provide evidence of group polarization. Additionally, we investigate how blocking and sharing screenshots of tweets instead of reacting to them in the standard ways contribute to the formation and perpetuation of online echo chambers.

We are witnessing increasing partisan polarization across the world. It is often argued that partisan "echo chambers" are one of the drivers of both policy and affective polarization. In this article, we develop and test the argument that the political homogeneity of people's social environment shapes polarization. Using an innovative, large-scale pre-registered "lab-in-the-field" experiment in the United Kingdom, we examine how polarization is influenced by partisan group homogeneity. We recruit nationally representative partisans and assign them to discuss a salient policy issue, either with like-minded partisans (an echo chamber) or in a mixed-partisan group. This allows us to examine how group composition affects polarization. In line with our expectations, we find that partisan echo chambers increase both policy and affective polarization compared to mixed discussion groups. This has important implications for our understanding of the drivers of polarization and for how out-group animosity might be ameliorated in the mass public.

In this study, we examine how political party preference and politically active social media use associate with social media behaviors - namely, conformist, provocative, and protective - in the context of the current political sphere in Finland. In our empirical analysis, we use a nationally representative dataset collected from 3,724 Finnish citizens in 2018. Our research confirms the assumption that there are notable differences in the social media behaviors of the supporters of different political parties. Additionally, our research shows that politically active social media use increases the occurrence for all three aforementioned behaviors. The study's results also confirm that major differences in online behavior exist among the new identity parties' supporters, who rely heavily on post-materialist and neoconservative political values. ; Peer reviewed