Papers
[1]. Garrett, R. Kelly. “Echo chambers online?: Politically motivated selective exposure among Internet news users.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication2 (2009): 265-285.
[2]. Bakshy, Eytan, Solomon Messing, and Lada A. Adamic. “Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook.” Science6239 (2015): 1130-1132.
Summary
In Baksy’s et al 2015 paper, the main question is: how do online networks influence exposure to perspectives that cut across ideological lines? They focus only on Facebook. To this end, they assemble data shared by U.S. users over a 6-month period between 7 July 2014 and 7 January 2015. Then, they measure ideological homophily in friend networks and examined the extent to which heterogeneous friends could potentially expose individuals to cross-cutting content They construct an indicator score, “Alignment”, that ranks sources based on their ideological affiliation. They quantify the extent to which individuals encounter comparatively more or less diverse content while interacting via Facebook’s algorithmically ranked News Feed and further studied users’ choices to click through to ideologically discordant content. They find that compared with algorithmic ranking, individuals’ choices played a stronger role in limiting exposure to cross-cutting content.
In Garret’s 2009 paper, the author examines whether the desire for opinion reinforcement may play a more important role in shaping individuals’ exposure to online political information than an aversion to opinion challenge. In doing so, data collected via a web administered behavior-tracking study over a six-week period in 2005. The subjects were recruited from the readership of 2 partisan online news sites. The results demonstrate that opinion-reinforcing information promotes news story exposure while opinion-challenging information makes exposure only marginally less likely.
Reflection
Baksy et al published in 2015, is dealing with contemporary events that are widely discussed. The role of social media has been at the epicenter of due to its, according to some, significant impact in shaping the political landscape of the United States. Compared with algorithmic ranking, individuals’ choices played a stronger role in limiting exposure to cross-cutting content Subsequently, one question that begs an answer is whether these results remain the same now
Baksy et al specifically focused on Facebook, there is a caveat that I wonder whether the research took into account on whether people actually “Follow” their friends. For instance, what about the information users are exposed to by the things their Friends like, or share? Is this considered part of the “News Feed”? I would argue that this might have more significant effect on “Echo Chambers” than the algorithmically ranked news feed. Even in this case, you only see a subset of what your “friends” share, the friends that you actually “follow”. In addition, how about the information that you receive by the “groups” that you “follow”? I am not sure if the paper addressed this issue.
In addition, individuals may read the summaries of articles that appear in the News Feed and therefore be exposed to some of the articles’ content without clicking through.
I also find it interesting that for both liberals and conservatives the median proportion of friendships of the people on the opposite spectrum is roughly the same, around 20% following the 20/80 Pareto principle.
In Garret’s I found the experimental design particularly thoughtful an interesting, including the fact that they had screening questions. However, it should be stressed that they examine the issue of echo chambers only the in the context of politics. The dependent variable is the “use of issue related news”. It should be noted that they measured the dependent variable by their “interest in reading” and “read time”. From modeling perspective, it appears that Garret is using a “mixed model”, which is a statistical model containing both “fixed effects” and “random effects”. It might have been a good idea to include control for time trends, since there is a time wedge of six weeks in the study. Possibly including a dummy for each week would make the results more robust, although I can understand that from the author’s view 6 weeks is a short period. Still, individual fixed-effects control only for factors that remain constant between those 6 weeks.
For the logit model that examines “story selection”, the “opinion challenge” variable in the logit model has a p-value 5% to 10%. Therefore, for that model I believe the readers should place more emphasis on the results regarding “opinion-reinforcement” variable.
I wonder whether there should be some guidebook or manual that would warn and instruct us how to search information on the web-search engines. However, I don’t believe that opinion-reinforcing web searches belief is tantamount to an echo chamber. To put it bluntly, if the users are conscious that they conducting an opinion-reinforcing web-search, then what’s wrong with that? Nothing. There are degrees of “echo chambers” and whether there is critical threshold by which an echo chamber is harming the user is yet to be seen. For instance, opinion-reinforcing web search on medical issues has serious ramification on public health. Such qualitative factors impart a different contextual meaning of what an “echo-chamber” is and its ramifications. Moreover, such qualitative factors should be taken into account. The quantitative models must include more information distinctions than just “hard” or “soft” news.
Finally, I have a broader skepticism that transcends the main goal of the Baksy et al paper. Facebook, and other social media websites, are under fire for bolstering “fake news”. This criticism -financial incentive to force social media platforms to rank them higher than smaller media outlets. This is called the “principal-agent” problem in corporate finance. There should healthy skepticism.
Questions
- The study was conducted in 2015. Would these results hold today?
- How about effect of “Following” your friends? Does this take into account the information that you are exposed to?
- What are the factors the about the order which users see stories in the News Feed? Do they weigh the same way?
- There is a qualitative aspect on “echo-chambers”. The distinction of information should be more than “hard” or “soft” news. There might be an “echo-chamber” on information related to politics but not on medical/health issues. When the stakes are high, i.e. your health, are any of the hypotheses listed on Garret’s paper validated? My hunch is not. This qualitative heterogeneity is not addressed properly. I believe this requires further investigation.
