Geographic Echo Chambers in the Brexit Campaign on Twitter

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 anti-Brexit tweets from a variety of hashtags, and sought to geolocate the users (through geographic coordinates, profile information, and other available details); it then also examined interactions through @mentions and retweets and coded them as in-bubble, cross-bubble, and out-bubble according to the Leave or Remain leanings of sender and receiver

This found, first, a strong level of interaction within each campaign; there was far less connection between and across divergent camps. In-bubble interaction increased for Remain with greater geographic distance between users; but decreased for Leave. In the case of Leave, there is a sharp spike in in-bubble interactions within a 10km distances between users.

This is especially pronounced in the final weeks of the campaign, during which Leave is especially focussed on short-distance in-bubble interactions, and Remain is more focussed on long-distance in-bubble interactions. Connections between London and the Southeast and Edinburgh are especially pronounced for Remain. Such patterns may also point to the greater geographic mobility of Remainers, compared to Leavers.