Thanks for sharing those twitter handles, I’ll check ’em out.
They found that the overwhelming majority of users were deeply ingrained in either a science community or a conspiracy community;
Yes, they mention this specifically in how they setup their experiment—they sampled FB groups that were explicitly either about conspiracy theories or science—so their sample is not representative of the larger group.
I think their main finding is this: “In the discussions here, users show a tendency to seek out and receive information that strengthens their preferred narrative (see the reaction to trolling posts in conspiracy echo chambers) and to reject information that undermines it (see the failure of debunking)”. However, it does seem to me that their method would lead to this finding, like if you go out looking for echo chambers, you will end up finding them, because there are over four billion users on social media.
Thanks for sharing those twitter handles, I’ll check ’em out.
Yes, they mention this specifically in how they setup their experiment—they sampled FB groups that were explicitly either about conspiracy theories or science—so their sample is not representative of the larger group.
I think their main finding is this: “In the discussions here, users show a tendency to seek out and receive information that strengthens their preferred narrative (see the reaction to trolling posts in conspiracy echo chambers) and to reject information that undermines it (see the failure of debunking)”. However, it does seem to me that their method would lead to this finding, like if you go out looking for echo chambers, you will end up finding them, because there are over four billion users on social media.