论文标题

社交媒体上的Echo Chambers:比较分析

Echo Chambers on Social Media: A comparative analysis

论文作者

Cinelli, Matteo, Morales, Gianmarco De Francisci, Galeazzi, Alessandro, Quattrociocchi, Walter, Starnini, Michele

论文摘要

最近的研究表明,在线用户倾向于选择遵守其信念系统的信息,忽略没有的信息,并加入围绕共同叙述的团体(即回声室)。尽管仍然缺少一种定量方法来识别其识别,但回声室的现象在科学和政治层面都广泛争论。为了阐明这个问题,我们介绍了回声室的操作定义,并对1M用户在四个社交媒体平台上生产的1M用户生产的1B内容进行了大规模的比较分析:Facebook,Twitter,Reddit和Gab。我们推断用户倾向于有争议的主题 - 从疫苗到堕胎 - 并通过分析不同的功能(例如共享链接域,遵循页面,追随者关系和评论帖子)来重建其交互网络。我们的方法量化了沿两个主要维度的回声室的存在:相互作用网络中的同质性和信息扩散到可能有意识的同伴中。我们发现社交媒体之间的特殊差异。确实,尽管Facebook和Twitter在所有观察到的数据集中都呈现清晰的回声室,但Reddit和GAB却没有。最后,我们通过比较Reddit和Facebook来测试社交媒体平台在新闻消费中的作用。同样,我们发现支持以下假设:实施新闻源算法(如Facebook)可能会引起回声室的出现。

Recent studies have shown that online users tend to select information adhering to their system of beliefs, ignore information that does not, and join groups - i.e., echo chambers - around a shared narrative. Although a quantitative methodology for their identification is still missing, the phenomenon of echo chambers is widely debated both at scientific and political level. To shed light on this issue, we introduce an operational definition of echo chambers and perform a massive comparative analysis on more than 1B pieces of contents produced by 1M users on four social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Gab. We infer the leaning of users about controversial topics - ranging from vaccines to abortion - and reconstruct their interaction networks by analyzing different features, such as shared links domain, followed pages, follower relationship and commented posts. Our method quantifies the existence of echo-chambers along two main dimensions: homophily in the interaction networks and bias in the information diffusion toward likely-minded peers. We find peculiar differences across social media. Indeed, while Facebook and Twitter present clear-cut echo chambers in all the observed dataset, Reddit and Gab do not. Finally, we test the role of the social media platform on news consumption by comparing Reddit and Facebook. Again, we find support for the hypothesis that platforms implementing news feed algorithms like Facebook may elicit the emergence of echo-chambers.

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