Twitter echo chambers reflect the real world
Political echo chambers on Twitter may reflect real-world conversations tied to the user's location, according to researchers at City, University of London .
“This challenges the assumption that echo chambers are a disease created by social media and suggests that people are bringing their pub conversations into online discourse,”
says research leader Marco Bastos, lecturer at the Institute of Sociology.
Regional online
The researchers analyzed 33,889 tweets from the past ten weeks before the Brexit referendum on June 23, 2016. They took into account 15,299 Twitter users who had made it clear in their own tweets which side they were on. They found that both Brexit supporters and opponents interacted with clear like-minded people through almost 70 percent of their tweets, which suggests that online echo chambers were very real before the referendum.
What was particularly interesting was the geographical allocation of the tweets. Users who posted pro-Brexit tweets live, on average, only 22 kilometers apart. So they mainly exchanged ideas with others from their own region. The real-world distance between Brexit opponents was almost twice as large, suggesting a cross-regional exchange.
In addition, the closer the referendum has become, the more Brexit supporters have withdrawn into their real-world geographical environment in their Twitter interactions. Supporters of remaining in the EU, on the other hand, have interacted with even more distant users.
Connected worlds
“Our study sheds light on the previously largely unexplored connection between the online and offline dimensions of our society,”
says co-author Andrea Baronchelli, lecturer at the Institute of Mathematics. The Twitter maps created by the team also show that clusters of Brexit supporters and opponents correspond very well with which parts of Great Britain ultimately clearly voted “Leave” or “Remain”, i.e. against or for the EU.
Baronchelli expects the current work to spark greater interest in exploring the connections between the real and virtual worlds.
“For example, future studies should explore whether participation in online echo chambers is motivated by talking offline with people who also share political views, or whether this goes in the opposite direction,”
he says finally.
Notes:
1) This content reflects the current state of affairs at the time of publication. The reproduction of individual images, screenshots, embeds or video sequences serves to discuss the topic. 2) Individual contributions were created through the use of machine assistance and were carefully checked by the Mimikama editorial team before publication. ( Reason )