Misinformation and Media Symposium 2018

Filter Bubbles in the Australian Twittersphere?

Axel Bruns

• 10 Sep. 2018 – Misinformation and Media Symposium 2018, Canberra

Abstract

Australia’s conservative commentators regularly claim that Twitter is “little more than a left­wing echo chamber for various highly politicised activists, including many journalists” (Mitchell, 2016), or “tends to host hard-left superficiality” (Kenny, 2017). Indeed, the long-standing Twitter hashtag for Australian political discussion, #auspol, is consistently one of the most prominent hashtags in the Australian Twittersphere (Sauter & Bruns, 2015), and discussion there is often intense and controversial. The commentators’ claims that that social media spaces constitute so-called “echo chambers” (Sunstein, 2009) or “filter bubbles” (Pariser 2012) play to commonplace clichés about online communities, therefore.

The empirical evidence that ordinary users experience their everyday social media environments as echo chambers or filter bubbles remains considerably more limited, however. For instance, research by the Pew Center in the lead-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election found that only 23% of U.S. users on Facebook and 17% on Twitter say that their contacts’ views are similar to their own; 20% have changed their minds about an issue because of interactions on social media (Duggan & Smith, 2016). In Europe, Vaccari et al.’s work on political debate in the German and Italian Twitterspheres (2016) found a mixed picture that included homophilous “echo chambers” as well as heterophilous “contrarian clubs”.

Building on large-scale, comprehensive data from TrISMA, a project that continuously tracks the activities of the 500,000 most historically active accounts in the Australian Twittersphere (Bruns et al., 2016), this paper explores in detail the extent to which “echo chambers” or “filter bubbles” are evident within this network. It draws both on the established, long-term follower relationships amongst these accounts and on quotidian, short-term interactions between them through @mentions and retweets to examine, first, the extent to which the overall Australian Twittersphere separates into distinct follower network clusters within which information may flow more quickly than it can between them; and second, the degree to which the observable day-to-day flow of information and communication through interactions between accounts appears to be affected by such underlying network structures. Finally, by analysing the URLs included in tweets it also pays particular attention to the outside sources of information that are commonly shared within and across the different clusters that constitute the overall Australian Twittersphere; in doing so, the paper both assesses the extent of filter bubble tendencies from a network analysis perspective, and develops a picture of the content that circulates within such network formations. The paper thereby moves the present debate beyond a merely anecdotal footing, and offers a more reliable assessment of the ‘filter bubble’ threat in the Australian Twittersphere.

References

Bruns, A., Burgess, J., Banks, J., Tjondronegoro, D., Dreiling, A., Hartley, J., Leaver, T., Aly, A., Highfield, T., Wilken, R., Rennie, E., Lusher, D., Allen, M., Marshall, D., Demetrious, K., and Sadkowsky, T. (2016). TrISMA: Tracking Infrastructure for Social Media Analysis. http://trisma.org/.

Duggan, M., & Smith, A. (2016). The Political Environment on Social Media. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center. Retrieved from http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/14/2016/10/24160747/PI_2016.10.25_Politics-and-Social-Media_FINAL.pdf

Kenny, C. (2017, June 16). When Sensible Discussion Is Overwhelmed by Shouting, It’s Time for Reform. The Australian. Retrieved from https://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/inquirer/when-sensible-discussion-is-overwhelmed-by-shouting-its-time-for-reform/news-story/3546717e50bf91b549a59b9f18a20bb1

Mitchell, C. (2016, August 8). Politicians, Journalists Using Social Media Obscure Real Issues. The Australian. Retrieved from http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/media/opinion/politicians-journalists-using-social-media-obscure-real-issues/news-story/877417373bf26960324d781d8d4b258c

Pariser, E. (2012). The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You. London: Penguin.

Sauter, T., & Bruns, A. (2015). #auspol: The Hashtag as Community, Event, and Material Object for Engaging with Australian Politics. In N. Rambukkana (Ed.), Hashtag Publics: The Power and Politics of Discursive Networks (pp. 47–60). New York: Peter Lang.

Sunstein, C. R. (2009). Republic.com 2.0. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Vaccari, C., Valeriani, A., Barberà, P., Jost, J. T., Nagler, J., & Tucker, J. A. (2016). Of Echo Chambers and Contrarian Clubs: Exposure to Political Disagreement among German and Italian Users of Twitter. Social Media + Society, 2(3), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305116664221