Endogenetic structure of filter bubble in social networks.

Tingjun Jiang,Xiaogang Jin,Qu Li,Yong Min,Cheng Jin

doi:10.1098/rsos.190868

Abstract

The filter bubble is an intermediate structure to provoke polarization and echo chambers in social networks, and it has become one of today's most urgent issues for social media. Previous studies usually equated filter bubbles with community structures and emphasized this exogenous isolation effect, but there is a lack of full discussion of the internal organization of filter bubbles. Here, we design an experiment for analysing filter bubbles taking advantage of social bots. We deployed 128 bots to Weibo (the largest microblogging network in China), and each bot consumed a specific topic (entertainment or sci-tech) and ran for at least two months. In total, we recorded about 1.3 million messages exposed to these bots and their social networks. By analysing the text received by the bots and motifs in their social networks, we found that a filter bubble is not only a dense community of users with the same preferences but also presents an endogenetic unidirectional star-like structure. The structure could spontaneously exclude non-preferred information and cause polarization. Moreover, our work proved that the felicitous use of artificial intelligence technology could provide a useful experimental approach that combines privacy protection and controllability in studying social media.

Highlights

With the growing popularity of social media, especially microblogging platforms, the way people obtain information and form opinions has undergone substantial change
Selective exposure of information source and information has been considered the primary mechanism of polarization
Since the initial users have been set as the users who mainly post or repost the corresponding topic, the initial (t = 0) preferred topic ratio can be as high as R0EG 1⁄4 76:77% for environment group (EG) and random entertainment group (REG) and R0STG 1⁄4 50:00% for sci-tech group (STG) and random sci-tech group (RSTG) on average

Summary

Introduction

With the growing popularity of social media, especially microblogging platforms, the way people obtain information and form opinions has undergone substantial change. A recent study found that social media has become the primary source for over 60% of users to obtain news [1]. These users are selectively exposed to more personalized information, which is considered to limit the diversity of content they consume and give rise to filter bubbles [2,3,4]. Online users tend to select messages or information sources supporting their existing beliefs or cohering with their preferences and to form filter bubbles [4]. The polarization process, especially the features of filter bubbles, still needs further clarification

Methods

Results

Conclusion