The first paper in the final session at AoIR 2018 today is SeongJae Min, who is interested in the role of algorithms in determining what we are exposed to on social media; the major finding from his research is that people’s choices matter at least as much as algorithmic shaping.

Concepts such as ‘echo chambers’ and ‘filter bubbles’ have become popularised in recent times, but there is a significant lack of empirical evidence for such phenomena; if anything, they are more prevalent in localised offline contexts than global online networks, where cross-cutting exposure is considerably more likely to occur. But …

The final speaker in this Social Media & Society 2018 session is Andra Siibak, whose interest is in opinion polarisation on social media and the question of whether these constitute ‘echo chambers’ or ‘filter bubbles’. Individual abilities and digital literacies might affect the extent to which users find themselves in such environments, or are aware of them. Andra examined this in the context of an anti-immigration Facebook community in Estonia.

Estonians are particularly strong Internet (and social media) users; this is especially pronounced for younger Estonians. When the European refugee crisis emerged, this manifested in the rapid creation of various …

The next speaker in this session at ICA 2018 is Marco Toledo Bastos, whose interest is in the presence of echo chambers in the debate leading up to the Brexit vote. Echo chambers, especially on social media, have been blamed for the unexpected results of that referendum and a variety of other elections, but recent research has also challenged such perspectives.

In Britain, the referendum was also decided strongly along geographic lines (city vs. country, England vs. Scotland) – so is there a geographic element to any echo chamber patterns that may exist here? The present study captured pro- and …

The final speaker in our ICA 2018 panel is Neil Thurman. He notes that beyond the platform studies we must also look at the intersections between different social networks and platforms, and at the broader societal debate about echo chambers and filter bubbles. His work builds on the 2016 Reuters Institute Digital News Survey (covering 26 countries), and explores how aware and concerned users are of and about the algorithmic and editorial selection of the news content they engage with.

Some 57% of respondents are worried about missing out on challenging viewpoints and important information as a result of such …

The next speaker in our ICA 2018 session is Bibi Reisdorf, who focusses on how people tailor their social network connections through friending, unfriending, and blocking. This again draws on the Quello Search Project study, a survey of 14,000 search users across seven nations.

First, Internet users consult an average of 4.5 different types of media to find information about politics; more than 50% use search engines to check information (very) often, and 80% do it from time to time (how they do so is limited by their search skills, however). There are also some national variations in these patterns …

The next paper in this ICA 2018 session is mine. The slides are below, and there’s also a full paper on this topic (from last year’s Future of Journalism conference):

The second ICA 2018 session this morning is the one I have a paper in as well – we’re discussing the (scant) empirical evidence for echo chambers and filter bubbles. We start, though, with a paper by Anja Bechmann that is working with a broad sample of newsfeed data from Danish Facebook users.

The newsfeed potentially acts as a shared public news platform where people meet around shared news content. ‘News’ here might mean many things – journalistic, political news in a narrow sense, but also user-oriented relation news and the user updates of many kinds that newsfeed algorithms treat …