Author: Bethany Brookshire / Source: Science News
When it comes to politics, people on one side of the aisle often love to accuse everyone on the other of living in an echo chamber.
Liberals hear only what they want to hear, while conservatives read only the news they agree with. (Of course, all those making the accusations are not in bubbles themselves. Oh no, of course not.)A study published earlier this year suggests that those bubble accusations may be true — at least on Twitter.
Twitter users are most exposed to, and engage most with, the viewpoints that are closest to their own, the study shows. Those who do try to bridge the partisan divide suffer the ultimate social media consequence — less popularity.
Computer scientist Kiran Garimella of Aalto University in Finland started out studying algorithms that might show how polarization arises on social media. But in 2016, fate intervened. “Luckily Trump and Brexit happened, and polarization became more mainstream,” he recalls. Garimella no longer needed to try to predict if polarization would occur; it was happening right on his computer screen. So Garimella began to look at where echo chambers of that polarization might exist, and what it meant for the people in them.
Garimella and his colleagues examined more than 100 million publicly available tweets from 2015 to 2016 that were in a series of public datasets. The scientists focused specifically on political hashtags such as #guncontrol, #Obamacare and #abortion and on tweets surrounding the 2016 United States presidential election. They also included a large dataset of 2.6 billion tweets from people who retweeted presidential and vice-presidential candidates from 2009 to 2016.
And the researchers examined tweets by people the users followed to study the content the users were consuming. They also built a model to represent the social connections among the users. Finally, the scientists analyzed the tweets themselves for their political leanings, examining which publications tweets linked to, and rated those publications on a scale from left-leaning to right-leaning.
The researchers compared tweets on those political hot topics to a smaller control set of around 48 million tweets on nonpolitical…
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