Abstract
Investigating how echo chambers emerge in social networks is increasingly crucial, given their role in facilitating the retention of misinformation, inducing intolerance towards opposing views, and misleading public and political discourse. Previously, the emergence of echo chambers has been attributed to psychological biases and inter-individual differences, requiring repeated interactions among network-users and rewiring or pruning of social ties. Using an idealised population of social network users, the present results suggest that when combined with positive credibility perceptions of a communicating source, social media users’ ability to rapidly share information with each other through a single cascade can be sufficient to produce echo chambers. Crucially, we show that this requires neither special psychological explanation (e.g., bias or individual differences), nor repeated interactions—though these may be exacerbating factors. In fact, this effect is made increasingly worse the more generations of peer-to-peer transmissions it takes for information to permeate a network. This raises important questions for social network architects, if truly opposed to the increasing prevalence of deleterious societal trends that stem from echo chamber formation.
Highlights
To investigate when and how echo chambers emerge, it is important to explore their causes. These might be routed in psychological biases: previous analyses of echo chambers and their impact on digital misinformation identified confirmation bias—seeking information confirming one’s prior beliefs (Nickerson )—and social influence—people’s tendency to align their behaviour with the demands of their social environment (Kelman )—as key driving factors of echo chamber formation (Del Vicario et al a; Starnini et al ; Sikder et al )
Our work examined whether echo chambers emerge in a population of homogeneous, rational users that update their beliefs through a single interaction and under consideration of the credibility of communicating sources
Our results show that when agents evaluated the credibility of a communicating source by looking how many of their fellow network peers supported vs. not supported the source’s communication (‘social’ agent population), echo chambers emerged inevitably as a result of single interactions with connectivity densities smaller than - %
Summary
Assuming that each user has friends that share no social ties with another user’s friends, the ‘second-generation’ of friends that has access to the initial tweet already has a size of If this process is repeated for only a few generations of users, a single initial piece of information can permeate rapidly through a social network without requiring repeated communications between individual users. Considering this ability to rapidly spread information on social media, we see a single-interaction model of echo chamber formation as an important contribution expanding previous models focusing on repeated interaction and network pruning over time (see Lorenz ; Sikder et al ).
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