The Sound of an Echo
July 16, 2024
VOX-Pol Blog post. ...
Inside a White Power echo chamber: Why fringe digital spaces are polarizing politics
September 18, 2023
Recent decades have seen a blurring of the line between extremist movements and mainstream politics, driven by rising sectarian polarization. This development has been linked to digital media, with suggestions that so-called echo chambers may drive political radicalization. To understand the social processes taking place inside such digital spaces, this article draws on Randall Collins ...
Digitalization and Political Extremism
September 18, 2023
Information and communication technologies shape, direct, and deter political behaviour and institutions as the increase in internet usage regulate our daily lives. The advance of internet and digital media also shape political involvement, partisanship, and ideology. Internet, as the new media, is an important information source that shapes political behaviour along with other effects on ...
Examining the interactive effects of the filter bubble and the echo chamber on radicalization
September 18, 2023
Objectives Despite popular notions of “filter bubbles” and “echo chambers” contributing to radicalization, little evidence exists to support these hypotheses. However, social structure social learning theory would suggest a hereto untested interaction effect. Methodology An RCT of new Twitter users in which participants were randomly assigned to a treatment of “filter bubble” (personalization algorithm) suppression. ...
Fanning the Flames of Hate: Social Media and Hate Crime
September 18, 2023
This paper investigates the link between social media and hate crime. We show that antirefugee sentiment on Facebook predicts crimes against refugees in otherwise similar municipalities with higher social media usage. To establish causality, we exploit exogenous variation in the timing of major Facebook and internet outages. Consistent with a role for “echo chambers,” we ...
Echo Chambers on Social Media: A Systematic Review of the Literature
September 18, 2023
The increasing pervasiveness of social media has been matched by growing concerns regarding their potential impact on democracy and public debate. While some theorists have claimed that ICTs and social media would bring about a new independent public sphere and increase exposure to political divergence, others have warned that they would lead to polarization, through ...
Evaluating the scale, growth, and origins of right-wing echo chambers on YouTube
September 18, 2023
Although it is understudied relative to other social media platforms, YouTube is arguably the largest and most engaging online media consumption platform in the world. Recently, YouTube’s outsize influence has sparked concerns that its recommendation algorithm systematically directs users to radical right-wing content. Here we investigate these concerns with large scale longitudinal data of individuals’ ...