Inequality is one of the biggest issue of our age, with policy makers the world over grappling with the unique challenges it presents to society.  It’s widely believed to drive social segregation and polarization in urban neighborhoods, but a new study from the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI) highlights how it’s also common in online communities as well.

The early days of the Internet saw confidence that it would see the democratization of how information was exchanged, but the authors argue that online social networks have actually mirrored the kind of segregation seen in urban neighborhoods in real cities.

The findings come from an analysis of millions of tweets, with people often organizing themselves into echo-chambers that are segregated along economic lines.  What’s more, this fragmentation becomes self-reinforcing over time, resulting in the polarization of communities.

Mapping networks

The researchers examined people’s tweets to discern who they were speaking too in the hope that this would allow them to map networks of social mobility across several cities in both the United States and further afield.  The networks that were produced were then compared to census data that provided neighborhood income information.

The analysis reveals that most people interact with others from their socio-economic group.  Just as segmentation tends to occur offline, so too does it appear online, as different classes not only don’t mix in the same places, but don’t discuss the same topics either.  This divide happens at an incredibly granular level and therefore goes beyond merely a divide between the richest and poorest members of society.

The authors remind us that segregation of societies can arise autonomously in any community, and the way we share information can help to self-reinforce group norms and identities.  The hashtag analysis performed by the team highlighted the divergence in topics discussed in different socio-economic communities, with lifestyle topics more common in richer communities and sports more popular in poorer groups.

The researchers believe that a big factor in this segregation is the relatively poor levels of mobility between neighborhoods, and this is more important than any geographic distances between them.  They believe that policy makers could play a role if they desegregated the places people live, work and shop to boost interactions between people from different walks of life.