Do you have a source on the claims about echo chambers? I feel like most studies I encounter on it say that echo chambers are an overrated issue, with people tending to interact with contradictory views, but I haven’t looked into it in detail.
The way echo chambers work seems to be popularly mis-explained.
How’s it’s explained: everyone you encounter agrees with you
How it actually works: everyone you encounter who you disagree with appears to be insane or evil. Next time you encounter someone who disagrees with you, you expect them to be insane or evil, causing you to act in a way that seems to them to be insane or evil. Iterate.
That second phenomenon seems to be a thing, though I wouldn’t use the word “echo chamber” to refer to it. More like “polarization” or “radicalization”.
The study you linked smells fishy to me. They found that the overwhelming majority of users were deeply ingrained in either a science community or a conspiracy community; but that doesn’t match my experience on facebook, where most people just seem to share stuff from their life. Is it possible that they specifically sampled from science communities/conspiracy communities? (Which would obviously overstate the degree of polarization and echo chambers by a huge amount.) They don’t seem to describe how they sampled their users, unless I’m missing something, but given the context I would guess that they specifically sampled users who were active in the communities they looked at.
Regarding the studies that said it was overstated, as I said I haven’t looked into it in detail, I just follow a bunch of social science people on twitter and they’ve discussed this, with the people who seem more trustworthy converging towards a view that the echo chamber issue is overrated and based on misinformation. But based on your comment I decided to look at the studies more closely, and they seemed a lot less convincing than I had expected, sometimes updating me in the opposite direction. Probably the twitter user that has the most comprehensive set of links is Rolf Degen, but I’ve also seen it from other sources, e.g. Michael Bang Petersen.
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.
Do you have a source on the claims about echo chambers? I feel like most studies I encounter on it say that echo chambers are an overrated issue, with people tending to interact with contradictory views, but I haven’t looked into it in detail.
The way echo chambers work seems to be popularly mis-explained.
How’s it’s explained: everyone you encounter agrees with you
How it actually works: everyone you encounter who you disagree with appears to be insane or evil. Next time you encounter someone who disagrees with you, you expect them to be insane or evil, causing you to act in a way that seems to them to be insane or evil. Iterate.
That second phenomenon seems to be a thing, though I wouldn’t use the word “echo chamber” to refer to it. More like “polarization” or “radicalization”.
I’ve seen papers like this: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Walter-Quattrociocchi/publication/331936299_Echo_Chambers_on_Facebook/links/5c93b14b299bf111693e20f4/Echo-Chambers-on-Facebook.pdf. However, given the difficulties in testing for their existence, I assign only a weak probability that echo chambers are real enough to affect human behavior.
Would you mind sharing your studies that they are an overrated issue? I would love to adjust my position.
The study you linked smells fishy to me. They found that the overwhelming majority of users were deeply ingrained in either a science community or a conspiracy community; but that doesn’t match my experience on facebook, where most people just seem to share stuff from their life. Is it possible that they specifically sampled from science communities/conspiracy communities? (Which would obviously overstate the degree of polarization and echo chambers by a huge amount.) They don’t seem to describe how they sampled their users, unless I’m missing something, but given the context I would guess that they specifically sampled users who were active in the communities they looked at.
Regarding the studies that said it was overstated, as I said I haven’t looked into it in detail, I just follow a bunch of social science people on twitter and they’ve discussed this, with the people who seem more trustworthy converging towards a view that the echo chamber issue is overrated and based on misinformation. But based on your comment I decided to look at the studies more closely, and they seemed a lot less convincing than I had expected, sometimes updating me in the opposite direction. Probably the twitter user that has the most comprehensive set of links is Rolf Degen, but I’ve also seen it from other sources, e.g. Michael Bang Petersen.
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.