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(Anti-)Echo Chamber Participation: Examining Contributor Activity Beyond the Chamber

Published: 18 July 2018 Publication History

Abstract

The existence of echo chambers as a phenomenon in social media has been widely debated in recent years. This research examines the social news website Reddit, where users engage with each other indirectly as part of topic-based communities. These discrete communities are free to define their own rules for contributor behaviour within the community. In this paper we examine two communities: r/The_Donald, which demands echo chamber behaviour, and r/changemyview which discourages it. We seek to determine whether contributors to the opposing types of chambers behave differently beyond their respective chambers.We find evidence that participants of both the echo chamber and the anti-echo chamber are more active across the platform than the average Reddit user.

References

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Andre Boutyline and Robb Willer. 2017. The social structure of political echo chambers: Variation in ideological homophily in online networks. Political Psychology 38, 3 (2017), 551--569.
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Axel Bruns. 2017. Echo chamber? What echo chamber? Reviewing the evidence. In In 6th Biennial Future of Journalism Conference (FOJ17). Cardiff, UK.
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Axel Bruns, Brenda Moon, Felix Munch, and Troy Sadkowsky. 2017. The Australian Twittersphere in 2016: Mapping the Follower/Followee Network. Social Media + Society 3, 4 (2017), 370--379.
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Lorien Jasny, JosephWaggle, and Dana R. Fisher. 2015. An empirical examination of echo chambers in US climate policy networks. Nature Climate Change 5, 8 (2015), 782.
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J. Miller McPherson and Lynn Smith-Lovin. 1977. Homophily in voluntary organizations: Status distance and the composition of face-to-face groups. American Sociological Review 52 (1977), 370--379.
[6]
r/changemyview. 2018. r/changemyview Wiki. https://www.reddit.com/r/ changemyview/wiki/index
[7]
r/The_Donald. 2018. r/The_Donald Wiki. https://www.reddit.com/r/The_ Donald/wiki/index
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Cass Sunstein. 2007. Republic.com (2nd. ed.). Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J.
[9]
u/Stuck_in_the_Matrix. 2015. I have every publicly available Reddit comment for research. https://www.reddit.com/r/datasets/comments/3bxlg7/i_have_every_ publicly_available_reddit_comment/
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u/Stuck_In_the_Matrix. 2017. Reddit Comments June 2017. https://bigquery. cloud.google.com/table/fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2017_06

Cited By

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  • (2024)Deliberate Exposure to Opposing Views and Its Association with Behavior and Rewards on Political CommunitiesProceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202410.1145/3589334.3645375(2347-2358)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
  • (2022)Adherence to Misinformation on Social Media Through Socio-Cognitive and Group-Based ProcessesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35555896:CSCW2(1-35)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022
  • (2021)False consensus in the echo chamber: Exposure to favorably biased social media news feeds leads to increased perception of public support for own opinionsCyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace10.5817/CP2021-1-315:1Online publication date: 16-Feb-2021
  • Show More Cited By

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cover image ACM Other conferences
SMSociety '18: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Social Media and Society
July 2018
405 pages
ISBN:9781450363341
DOI:10.1145/3217804
Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM acknowledges that this contribution was authored or co-authored by an employee, contractor or affiliate of a national government. As such, the Government retains a nonexclusive, royalty-free right to publish or reproduce this article, or to allow others to do so, for Government purposes only.

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  • Copenhagen Business School

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 18 July 2018

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Author Tags

  1. Reddit
  2. Social media
  3. echo chamber
  4. social news

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  • Short-paper
  • Research
  • Refereed limited

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SMSociety '18

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Overall Acceptance Rate 78 of 189 submissions, 41%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Deliberate Exposure to Opposing Views and Its Association with Behavior and Rewards on Political CommunitiesProceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202410.1145/3589334.3645375(2347-2358)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
  • (2022)Adherence to Misinformation on Social Media Through Socio-Cognitive and Group-Based ProcessesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35555896:CSCW2(1-35)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022
  • (2021)False consensus in the echo chamber: Exposure to favorably biased social media news feeds leads to increased perception of public support for own opinionsCyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace10.5817/CP2021-1-315:1Online publication date: 16-Feb-2021
  • (2020)Assessing temporal and spatial features in detecting disruptive users on RedditProceedings of the 12th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining10.1109/ASONAM49781.2020.9381426(892-896)Online publication date: 7-Dec-2020

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