Political Discourse on Social Media: Echo Chambers, Gatekeepers, and the Price of Bipartisanship

ABSTRACT

Echo chambers, i.e., situations where one is exposed only to opinions that agree with their own, are an increasing concern for the political discourse in many democratic countries. This paper studies the phenomenon of political echo chambers on social media. We identify the two components in the phenomenon: the opinion that is shared, and the »chamber» (i.e., the social network) that allows the opinion to »echo» (i.e., be re-shared in the network) -- and examine closely at how these two components interact. We define a production and consumption measure for social-media users, which captures the political leaning of the content shared and received by them. By comparing the two, we find that Twitter users are, to a large degree, exposed to political opinions that agree with their own. We also find that users who try to bridge the echo chambers, by sharing content with diverse leaning, have to pay a »price of bipartisanship» in terms of their network centrality and content appreciation. In addition, we study the role of »gatekeepers,» users who consume content with diverse leaning but produce partisan content (with a single-sided leaning), in the formation of echo chambers. Finally, we apply these findings to the task of predicting partisans and gatekeepers from social and content features. While partisan users turn out relatively easy to identify, gatekeepers prove to be more challenging.

References

1. Lada A Adamic and Natalie Glance. 2005. The political blogosphere and the 2004 US election: divided they blog. In LinkKDD. 36--43.
2. Jisun An, Daniele Quercia, Meeyoung Cha, Krishna Gummadi, and Jon Crowcroft. 2014. Sharing political news: the balancing act of intimacy and socialization in selective exposure. EPJ Data Science 3, 1 (2014), 12.
3. Jisun An, Daniele Quercia, and Jon Crowcroft. 2014. Partisan sharing: facebook evidence and societal consequences. In COSN. 13--24.
4. Eytan Bakshy, Solomon Messing, and Lada A Adamic. 2015. Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook. Science 348, 6239 (2015), 1130--1132.
5. Sven Banisch and Eckehard Olbrich. 2017. Opinion Polarization by Learning from Social Feedback. arXiv preprint arXiv:1704.02890 (2017).
6. Pablo Barberá. 2015. Birds of the Same Feather Tweet Together: Bayesian Ideal Point Estimation Using Twitter Data. Political Analysis 23, 1 (2015), 76--91.
7. Pablo Barberá, John T Jost, Jonathan Nagler, Joshua A Tucker, and Richard Bonneau. 2015. Tweeting from left to right: Is online political communication more than an echo chamber? Psychological science 26, 10 (2015), 1531--1542.
8. Karine Barzilai-Nahon. 2009. Gatekeeping: A critical review. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology 43, 1 (2009), 1--79.
9. Engin Bozdag. 2013. Bias in algorithmic filtering and personalization. Ethics and information technology 15, 3 (2013), 209--227.
10. Michael Conover, Jacob Ratkiewicz, Matthew Francisco, Bruno Gonçalves, Filippo Menczer, and Alessandro Flammini. 2011. Political Polarization on Twitter. In ICWSM.
11. Daniel DellaPosta, Yongren Shi, and Michael Macy. 2015. Why do liberals drink lattes? Amer. J. Sociology 120, 5 (2015), 1473--1511.
12. Stefano DellaVigna and Ethan Kaplan. 2007. The Fox News effect: Media bias and voting. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 122, 3 (2007), 1187--1234.
13. Arthur Edwards. 2013. (How) do participants in online discussion forums create 'echo chambers?': The inclusion and exclusion of dissenting voices in an online forum about climate change. Journal of Argumentation in Context 2, 1 (2013), 127--150.
14. Dieter Frey. 1986. Recent research on selective exposure to information. Advances in experimental social psychology 19 (1986), 41--80.
15. Kiran Garimella, Gianmarco De Francisci Morales, Aristides Gionis, and Michael Mathioudakis. 2016. Quantifying Controversy in Social Media. In Proceedings of the Ninth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM). ACM, 33--42.
16. Kiran Garimella, Gianmarco De Francisci Morales, Aristides Gionis, and Michael Mathioudakis. 2017. The Effect of Collective Attention on Controversial Debates on Social Media. In Proceedings of the Tenth Annual ACM Web Science Conference. ACM, 43--52.
17. Kiran Garimella, Gianmarco De Francisci Morales, Aristides Gionis, and Michael Mathioudakis. 2017. Reducing controversy by connecting opposing views. In Proceedings of the Tenth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM). ACM, 81--90.
18. Kiran Garimella, Aristides Gionis, Nikos Parotsidis, and Nikolaj Tatti. 2017. Balancing Information Exposure in Social Networks. In Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS).
19. Kiran Garimella and Ingmar Weber. 2017. A Long-Term Analysis of Polarization on Twitter. In Proceedings of the 11th AAAI International Conference on Web and Social Media. AAAI.
20. R Kelly Garrett. 2009. Echo chambers online?: Politically motivated selective exposure among Internet news users. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 14, 2 (2009), 265--285.
21. Eric Gilbert, Tony Bergstrom, and Karrie Karahalios. 2009. Blogs are echo chambers: Blogs are echo chambers. In 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. IEEE, 1--10.
22. Tim Groeling. 2013. Media bias by the numbers: Challenges and opportunities in the empirical study of partisan news. Annual Review of Political Science 16 (2013).
23. Max Grömping. 2014. 'Echo Chambers' Partisan Facebook Groups during the 2014 Thai Election. Asia Pacific Media Educator 24, 1 (2014), 39--59.
24. Marc J Hetherington. 2001. Resurgent mass partisanship: The role of elite polarization. American Political Science Review 95, 3 (2001), 619--631.
25. K Hazel Kwon, Onook Oh, Manish Agrawal, and H Raghav Rao. 2012. Audience gatekeeping in the Twitter service: An investigation of tweets about the 2009 Gaza conflict. AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction 4, 4 (2012), 212--229.
26. Eric Lawrence, John Sides, and Henry Farrell. 2010. Self-segregation or deliberation? Blog readership, participation, and polarization in American politics. Perspectives on Politics 8, 1 (2010), 141--157.
27. Kurt Lewin. 1943. Forces behind food habits and methods of change. Bulletin of the national Research Council 108, 1043 (1943), 35--65.
28. Charles G Lord, Lee Ross, and Mark R Lepper. 1979. Biased assimilation and attitude polarization: The effects of prior theories on subsequently considered evidence. Journal of personality and social psychology 37, 11 (1979), 2098.
29. Haokai Lu, James Caverlee, and Wei Niu. 2015. Biaswatch: A lightweight system for discovering and tracking topic-sensitive opinion bias in social media. In CIKM. ACM, 213--222.
30. Antonis Matakos, Evimaria Terzi, and Panayiotis Tsaparas. 2017. Measuring and moderating opinion polarization in social networks. Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery 31, 5 (2017), 1480--1505.
31. Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and James M Cook. 2001. Birds of a feather: Homophily in social networks. Annual review of sociology 27, 1 (2001), 415--444.
32. Lawrence Page, Sergey Brin, Rajeev Motwani, and Terry Winograd. 1999. The PageRank citation ranking: Bringing order to the web. Technical Report. Stanford InfoLab.
33. Markus Prior. 2013. Media and political polarization. Annual Review of Political Science 16 (2013), 101--127.
34. Xiaoyan Qiu, Diego FM Oliveira, Alireza Sahami Shirazi, Alessandro Flammini, and Filippo Menczer. 2017. Limited individual attention and online virality of low-quality information. Nature Human Behavior 1 (2017).
35. Walter Quattrociocchi, Antonio Scala, and Cass R Sunstein. 2016. Echo Chambers on Facebook. (2016).
36. Cass R Sunstein. 2009. Republic. com 2.0. Princeton University Press.
37. Kevin Wallsten. Political blogs and the bloggers who blog them: Is the political blogosphere and echo chamber. In American Political Science Association's Annual Meeting.
38. Bernard L Welch. 1947. The generalization ofstudent's' problem when several different population variances are involved. Biometrika 34, 1/2 (1947), 28--35.
39. Weiai Wayne Xu and Miao Feng. 2014. Talking to the broadcasters on Twitter: Networked gatekeeping in Twitter conversations with journalists. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 58, 3 (2014), 420--437.

Index Terms

• Human-centered computing

  • Collaborative and social computing

    • Collaborative and social computing theory, concepts and paradigms

      • Social networks

• Information systems

  • Information systems applications

    • Collaborative and social computing systems and tools

      • Social networking sites

  • World Wide Web

    • Web applications

      • Social networks

• Networks

  • Network types

    • Overlay and other logical network structures

      • Online social networks

      • Social media networks