It’s a common accusation that social media has created echo chambers whereby people surround themselves with people and ideas that reflect their own.  It creates a distorted world view that limits our ability to empathise with others and underpins a polarisation of political discourse.

That’s the hypothesis anyway.  It’s an accusation that a recent study from Oxford University refutes.  The study suggests that the fragmented society we see today is not the fault of social media.  Indeed, the echo chambers may not even be as dangerous as we perceive them to be.

Limited impact

The paper argues that the majority of us use a multitude of media outlets and social media platforms, which ensures that only a relatively small number actually reside in echo chambers.

The authors sampled a random population of adult Internet users in the UK to examine their media choices across six core variables: gender, income, ethnicity, age, breadth of media use and political interest.  The analysis suggests that the sheer breadth of media available online encourages people out of echo chambers rather than into them.

“Whatever the causes of political polarisation today, it is not social media or the internet,” the authors say. “If anything, most people use the internet to broaden their media horizons. We found evidence that people actively look to confirm the information that they read online, in a multitude of ways. They mainly do this by using a search engine to find offline media and validate political information. In the process they often encounter opinions that differ from their own and as a result whether they stumbled across the content passively or use their own initiative to search for answers while double checking their “facts”, some changed their own opinion on certain issues.”

Diverse sources

The study found that people typically consume news from four different media sources, with accounts on three social media platforms.  As you might expect, the more sources people used, the more able they were to avoid echo chambers.

Interestingly, things like age, income and ethnicity were not found to influence the likelihood of succumbing to an echo chamber, but political interest most definitely did.  The more interested in politics people were, the less likely they were to fall into an echo chamber. This is largely because such people are opinion leaders in their communities, and therefore try and consume as much content as possible.

So in other words, those that are influential in forming opinions don’t tend to live in an echo chamber, whilst those that do live in one aren’t that important in influencing others.

“Our results show that most people are not in a political echo chamber. The people at risk are those who depend on only a single medium for political news and who are not politically interested: about 8% of the population. However, because of their lack of political engagement, their opinions are less formative and their influence on others is likely to be comparatively small,” the authors conclude.