The echo chamber effect on social media

被引:913
作者
Cinelli, Matteo [1 ]
Morales, Gianmarco De Francisci [2 ]
Galeazzi, Alessandro [3 ]
Quattrociocchi, Walter [4 ]
Starnini, Michele [2 ]
机构
[1] Ca Foscari Univ Venice, Dept Environm Sci Informat & Stat, I-30172 Venice, Italy
[2] Inst Sci Interchange ISI Fdn, I-10126 Turin, Italy
[3] Univ Brescia, Dept Informat Engn, I-25123 Brescia, Italy
[4] Sapienza Univ Rome, Dept Comp Sci, I-00185 Rome, Italy
关键词
information spreading; echo chambers; social media; polarization; NEWS; EXPOSURE;
D O I
10.1073/pnas.2023301118
中图分类号
O [数理科学和化学]; P [天文学、地球科学]; Q [生物科学]; N [自然科学总论];
学科分类号
07 ; 0710 ; 09 ;
摘要
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.
引用
收藏
页数:8
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