One of the frequent accusations made against social media is that they facilitate the creation of echo chambers that prevent us from hearing a diversity of opinion, especially on contentious matters, such as politics. Of course, such echo chambers have existed long before social media emerged, and often these traditional echo chambers revolved around the geographic location of people.
A recent study from City University explored whether conversations on Twitter merely reflected those that would have traditionally taken place offline. The research analyzed over 30,000 tweets sent during the Brexit referendum campaign, both in terms of the content and the location of interactions.
It transpired that the average distance of messages between pro-leave supporters was 22km, whilst the average distance between pro-remain supporters was 40km.
Local conversations
“Our study suggests that online echo chambers may be the result of conversations that spill over from in-person interactions,” the authors say. “It calls into question the assumption that echo chambers are a kind of disease created by social media, and instead suggests that people are bringing their pub conversations to online debate.”
What’s more, it emerged that 69% of messages sent by pro-leave people were sent to other pro-leave accounts, with the remain side doing little better, with 68% going to fellow supporters. Indeed, just 9% of tweets sent by leave supporters were sent to remain supporters, who in return sent just 10% of their tweets to leave supporters.
The results highlight that there were clearly echo chambers in place during the run up to the referendum, but also that people were often communicating with others in their local area. The results do suggest however differences between leave and remain supporters.
“The differences between echo chambers involving leave and remain supporters can be explained by the distinct geographical clustering of their social networks where communication online represents part of their existing social relations,” the authors say.
This was visualized in maps created by the team to highlight the physical location of these echo chambers. It emerged that pro-leave messages were strongly clustered around areas of the UK that actually voted to leave the European Union. What’s more, as the eventual vote grew closer, the distance between pro-leave messages decreased, whilst the opposite occurred for remain supporters.
The researchers believe their work provides some valuable nuance to the way the offline and online worlds intersect, especially on important topics such as politics. Rather than providing a platform for different kinds of interactions, it seems that the online world often mimics the offline.
“We expect more intricate relationships between physical ties and online interactions to be at play and I anticipate our results will spark more research in this direction,” the researchers conclude. “For example, future studies should investigate whether participation in online echo chambers is motivated by talking to people offline who also share their political views or whether the directionality works the other way around.”
