Department of Environmental Sciences, Informatics and Statistics, Ca'Foscari Univerity of Venice, 30172 Venice, Italy.
Institute for Scientific Interchange (ISI) Foundation, 10126 Torino, Italy.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2021 Mar 2;118(9). doi: 10.1073/pnas.2023301118.
Social media may limit the exposure to diverse perspectives and favor the formation of groups of like-minded users framing and reinforcing a shared narrative, that is, echo chambers. However, the interaction paradigms among users and feed algorithms greatly vary across social media platforms. This paper explores the key differences between the main social media platforms and how they are likely to influence information spreading and echo chambers' formation. We perform a comparative analysis of more than 100 million pieces of content concerning several controversial topics (e.g., gun control, vaccination, abortion) from Gab, Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter. We quantify echo chambers over social media by two main ingredients: 1) homophily in the interaction networks and 2) bias in the information diffusion toward like-minded peers. Our results show that the aggregation of users in homophilic clusters dominate online interactions on Facebook and Twitter. We conclude the paper by directly comparing news consumption on Facebook and Reddit, finding higher segregation on Facebook.
社交媒体可能会限制人们接触不同观点的机会，并有利于形成志同道合的用户群体，从而形成共同的叙述，即回音室。然而，用户之间的互动模式和饲料算法在不同的社交媒体平台上有很大的不同。本文探讨了主要社交媒体平台之间的关键差异，以及它们如何影响信息传播和回音室的形成。我们对来自 Gab、Facebook、Reddit 和 Twitter 的超过 1 亿条涉及几个有争议话题（如枪支管制、疫苗接种、堕胎）的内容进行了比较分析。我们通过两个主要因素来量化社交媒体中的回音室：1）互动网络中的同质性，2）信息向志同道合的同伴扩散的偏差。我们的研究结果表明，在 Facebook 和 Twitter 上，用户在同质性群体中的聚集主导着在线互动。我们通过直接比较 Facebook 和 Reddit 上的新闻消费，发现 Facebook 上的隔离程度更高。
