Me, My Echo Chamber, and I : Introspection on Social Media Polarization
Name
p823-gillani.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
2.83 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
b9e06083ac34143f44fc8714e5bacf1e
Author(s)
Gillani, Nabeel
Yuan, Ann
Saveski, Martin
Vosoughi, Soroush
Roy, Deb K
Date Issued
April 2018
Journal
WWW '18: Proceedings of the 2018 World Wide Web Conference
Publisher
ACM Press
Citation
Gillani, Nabeel et al. "Me, My Echo Chamber, and I : Introspection on Social Media Polarization." WWW '18: Proceedings of the 2018 World Wide Web Conference, April 2018, Lyon, France, ACM Press, April 2018. © 2018 IW3C2 (International World Wide Web Conference Committee)
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Homophily - our tendency to surround ourselves with others who share our perspectives and opinions about the world - is both a part of human nature and an organizing principle underpinning many of our digital social networks. However, when it comes to politics or culture, homophily can amplify tribal mindsets and produce "echo chambers" that degrade the quality, safety, and diversity of discourse online. While several studies have empirically proven this point, few have explored how making users aware of the extent and nature of their political echo chambers influences their subsequent beliefs and actions. In this paper, we introduce Social Mirror, a social network visualization tool that enables a sample of Twitter users to explore the politically-active parts of their social network. We use Social Mirror to recruit Twitter users with a prior history of political discourse to a randomized experiment where we evaluate the effects of different treatments on participants' i) beliefs about their network connections, ii) the political diversity of who they choose to follow, and iii) the political alignment of the URLs they choose to share. While we see no effects on average political alignment of shared URLs, we find that recommending accounts of the opposite political ideology to follow reduces participants» beliefs in the political homogeneity of their network connections but still enhances their connection diversity one week after treatment. Conversely, participants who enhance their belief in the political homogeneity of their Twitter connections have less diverse network connections 2-3 weeks after treatment. We explore the implications of these disconnects between beliefs and actions on future efforts to promote healthier exchanges in our digital public spheres.
MIT Department
Program in Media Arts and Sciences (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/3178876.3186130
