Perceptions of Other Users’ Social Media Homophily

And the final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Bingbing Zhang, whose focus is on perceptions of how political homophilous other people’s social networks are; such unrealistic perceptions could then lead to unfounded beliefs about ‘echo chambers’ and ‘filter bubbles’.

This might also be related to perceptions of media biases against one’s own political views: if media are believed to be biased, then this might also be seen as a reason for the emergence of such ‘echo chambers’. Greater political homophily social distance is therefore also assumed to relate to media bias perceptions and media scepticism.

The project examined this through a two-wave national survey in the United States in 2019, assessing participants’ perceptions of the political homophily of their own and of other users’ social media networks and taking the difference to represent the concept of ‘political homophily social distance’. This always showed that users imagined others to have significantly more homophilous social media networks than they believed themselves to have.

Such strong perceptions of political homophily social distance also strongly predicted perceptions of media bias and scepticism towards the media system. It still needs to be understood whether these findings also apply to contexts other than the United States; whether these patterns are unevenly distributed across participants with different political perceptions; and while there is strong correlation it is unclear whether and in which direction there may be causation between those perceptions.