Recursive patterns in online echo chambers

Social media provides an essential platform for shaping and sharing opinions and consuming information in a decentralized way. However, users often interact with and are exposed to information mostly aligned with their beliefs, creating a positive feedback mechanism that reinforces those beliefs and excludes contrasting ones. In this paper, we study such mechanisms by analyzing the social network dynamics of controversial Twitter discussions using unsupervised methods that de...

Are online networking services complicit in facilitating social change for the worse? In two empirically informed simulation studies, we give a proof-of-concept that the speed of networking and the amplification of network actors' relational preferences can have a profound impact on diffusion dynamics on social networks, essentially counteracting the benefits that should accrue from networking according to the strength of weak ties argument. Our findings can help understand v...

Humanity for centuries has perfected skills of interpersonal interactions and evolved patterns that enable people to detect lies and deceiving behavior of others in face-to-face settings. Unprecedented growth of people's access to mobile phones and social media raises an important question: How does this new technology influence people's interactions and support the use of traditional patterns? In this paper, we answer this question for homophily driven patterns in social med...

While social media make it easy to connect with and access information from anyone, they also facilitate basic influence and unfriending mechanisms that may lead to segregated and polarized clusters known as "echo chambers." Here we study the conditions in which such echo chambers emerge by introducing a simple model of information sharing in online social networks with the two ingredients of influence and unfriending. Users can change both their opinions and social connectio...

In the digital era, information consumption is predominantly channeled through online news media disseminated on social media platforms. Understanding the complex dynamics of the news media environment and users habits within the digital ecosystem is a challenging task that requires at the same time large bases of data and accurate methodological approaches. This study contributes to this expanding research landscape by employing network science methodologies and entropic mea...

Widespread conspiracy theories, like those motivating anti-vaccination attitudes or climate change denial, propel collective action and bear society-wide consequences. Yet, empirical research has largely studied conspiracy theory adoption as an individual pursuit, rather than as a socially mediated process. What makes users join communities endorsing and spreading conspiracy theories? We leverage longitudinal data from 56 conspiracy communities on Reddit to compare individual...

On social media algorithms for content promotion, accounting for users preferences, might limit the exposure to unsolicited contents. In this work, we study how the same contents (videos) are consumed on different platforms -- i.e. Facebook and YouTube -- over a sample of $12M$ of users. Our findings show that the same content lead to the formation of echo chambers, irrespective of the online social network and thus of the algorithm for content promotion. Finally, we show tha...

Despite echo chambers in social media have been under considerable scrutiny, general models for their detection and analysis are missing. In this work, we aim to fill this gap by proposing a probabilistic generative model that explains social media footprints -- i.e., social network structure and propagations of information -- through a set of latent communities, characterized by a degree of echo-chamber behavior and by an opinion polarity. Specifically, echo chambers are mod...

Users online tend to consume information adhering to their system of beliefs and to ignore dissenting information. During the COVID-19 pandemic, users get exposed to a massive amount of information about a new topic having a high level of uncertainty. In this paper, we analyze two social media that enforced opposite moderation methods, Twitter and Gab, to assess the interplay between news consumption and content regulation concerning COVID-19. We compare the two platforms on ...

Echo chambers in online social networks, whereby users' beliefs are reinforced by interactions with like-minded peers and insulation from others' points of view, have been decried as a cause of political polarization. Here, we investigate their role in the debate around the 2016 US elections on Reddit, a fundamental platform for the success of Donald Trump. We identify Trump vs Clinton supporters and reconstruct their political interaction network. We observe a preference for...