Abstract
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.
Highlights
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
We explore the key differences between social media platforms and how they are likely to influence the formation of echo chambers or not
We explore the key differences between the main social media platforms and how they are likely to influence information spreading and the formation of echo chambers
Summary
Matteo Cinellia , Gianmarco De Francisci Moralesb , Alessandro Galeazzic , Walter Quattrociocchid, , and Michele Starninib aDepartment of Environmental Sciences, Informatics and Statistics, Ca’Foscari Univerity of Venice, 30172 Venice, Italy; bInstitute for Scientific Interchange (ISI) Foundation, 10126 Torino, Italy; cDepartment of Information Engineering, University of Brescia, 25123 Brescia, Italy; and dDepartment of Computer. 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. The effects and the very existence of echo chambers have been questioned [2, 27, 32] This issue is fueled by the scarcity of comparative studies on social media, especially concerning news consumption [33]. We operationalize the two common elements that characterize echo chambers into observables that can be quantified and empirically measured, namely, 1) the inference of the user’s leaning for a specific topic (e.g., politics, vaccines) and 2) the structure of their social interactions on the platform We use these elements to assess echo chambers’ presence by looking at two different aspects: 1) homophily in interactions concerning a specific topic and 2) bias in information diffusion from like-minded sources. We conclude the paper by directly comparing news consumption on Facebook and Reddit, finding higher segregation on Facebook than on Reddit
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