Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles

The next session I’m attending at ECREA 2018 is on ‘fake news’ in the European context, and it starts with Flavia Durach, whose focus is on the role of emotions in the dissemination of ‘fake news’. The term itself has become a buzzword, and is now used in a variety of ways; its use spiked in the lead-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, but it has a considerably longer history.

In ‘fake news’, there is a relation between the content, its dissemination, and the users involved in that dissemination. ‘Fake news’ itself can also be distinguished into mis-, dis- …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Javier Ruiz Soler, whose interest is in locating a transnational public sphere on Twitter, in the context of the EU. Many scholars are sceptical of the idea of a European public sphere, due to language and national differences, while others point to the emergence of a growing overlap between national communities and discussions.

Javier addressed these questions by studying hashtags such as #Schengen and #TTIP, as genuine pan-European issues that invite high levels of contestation. Transnationality in such data should be detected especially in countries that have high levels of …

The first panel on this final day of ECREA 2018 starts early (!), and begins with Frederic Guerrero-Solé. His work examines the overlaps of retweet networks for the posts of Spanish politicians and media. Frederic considers such retweeters to be active audiences for politicians; more passive audiences would be able to be studied by examining the followers of these accounts, but this is considerably more difficult.

In spite of the rhetoric, retweets are very often posted as a form of endorsement for these politicians; this tends to mean that overlaps between the retweet networks for politicians of different ideologies tend …

The final speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Svetlana Bodrunova, whose focus is on polarisation in Twitter-based discussions of inter-ethnic conflicts in the U.S., Germany, and Russia. She also notes that the debate about whether echo chambers and filter bubbles are real is still ongoing, and that attitudes towards political actors have been most researched to date; divergence in such attitudes is often interpreted as polarisation, but this often mistakes the formation of homophilous clusters for actual polarisation. Importantly, too, cluster formation is often non-binary, and instead leads to the development of multiple, overlapping, and dynamic thematic clusters …

The next speaker in this session at ECREA 2018 is Anne-Marie in der Au, who notes evidence that individual selection of media content may foster polarisation; however, there is also suspicion that algorithmic selection may foster such polarisation by building on and reinforcing such selective exposure. But empirical evidence on this is divided; several studies show no algorithmic impact or even demonstrate a negative correlation. What is going on here, and are there other variables that may interfere?

The present study examined these dynamics for the case of Germany, building on a representative phone survey. This measured the polarisation of …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Edda Humprecht, whose focus is on polarisation on Facebook. There is evidence of considerable negativity on this platform, and this may affect users’ perceptions of the world around them; in particular, it may increase their perception of societal polarisation. News outlets operating on the platform are now often accepting negative comments because they do not want to be seen to be censoring user comments – yet at the same time they are complaining about the negative aspects of user participation on social media.

Potential drivers for such negativity may include …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Jasmin Kadel, who presents a comparative study of polarisation across Switzerland and Germany. Polarisation can be understood along factual (across issues), perceived (misjudgments about polarisation in society), and affective dimensions (appreciation of co-partisan others); the study examined such polarisation amongst adult newspaper readers in both countries.

Factual polarisation turned out to be slightly stronger in Switzerland than in Germany, but it is weak in both countries; perceived polarisation, however, is greater in both countries, and especially so in Germany – Germans are less polarised but see them selves as more polarised …

The first session on this first full day at ECREA 2018 is on polarisation, and starts with Melanie Magin. She begins by highlighting the potential deleterious effects of polarisation on society: societies need a common meeting ground, and this has traditionally been provided by the news media and their agenda-setting function. But the diversification of information sources and channels may contribute to fragmenting this, and the algorithmic selection of content in these channels could aid this fragmentation – yet there is very little empirical evidence for the existence of the echo chambers or filter bubbles this is said to cause …

The final speaker in this iCS Symposium session is Laura Ianelli, whose focus is on understanding the supporters of conspiracy theories. Some such theories may be amusing, but many others are in fact deadly serious and can have significant negative effects. The networks for these theories can be closed epistemological networks with distinctive self-sealing qualities, and who are increasingly suspicious of broader social networks; this makes them difficult to reach for critical scholars.

Drawing on available digital traces in platforms such as Facebook would be one solution to this, but the increasing closure of its APIs is making this more …