论文标题
转发放大回声室效应
Retweets Amplify the Echo Chamber Effect
论文作者
论文摘要
社交媒体在公共话语中的越来越重要,导致人们对在线信息的质量及其在扩大政治两极分化中所扮演的作用进行了更大的审查。但是,在Twitter等社交媒体平台上进行两极分化的研究受到收集有关社交图的数据的困难,特别是遵循构成了Echo Chambers用户加入的链接以及他们在时间表中所看到的。作为追随者图的代理,研究人员使用转发,尽管尚不清楚这种选择如何影响分析。使用Twitter追随者图的示例以及用户在其中发布的推文,我们重建转推图,并量化其对回声室和曝光度量的影响。虽然我们发现两个图中都存在Echo Chambers,但它们在转发图中更为明显。我们将信息用户通过其追随者和转发网络进行比较,以表明转发的帐户共享系统上更两极分化的内容。这种偏见不能用用户自己的追随者图形社区中的活动或两极分化来解释,而是通过他们对意识形态上与自己的观点相符的帐户的越来越多的关注。我们的结果表明,依靠转发图的研究高估了回声室效应并暴露于两极分化信息。
The growing prominence of social media in public discourse has led to a greater scrutiny of the quality of online information and the role it plays in amplifying political polarization. However, studies of polarization on social media platforms like Twitter have been hampered by the difficulty of collecting data about the social graph, specifically follow links that shape the echo chambers users join as well as what they see in their timelines. As a proxy of the follower graph, researchers use retweets, although it is not clear how this choice affects analysis. Using a sample of the Twitter follower graph and the tweets posted by users within it, we reconstruct the retweet graph and quantify its impact on the measures of echo chambers and exposure. While we find that echo chambers exist in both graphs, they are more pronounced in the retweet graph. We compare the information users see via their follower and retweet networks to show that retweeted accounts share systematically more polarized content. This bias cannot be explained by the activity or polarization within users' own follower graph neighborhoods but by the increased attention they pay to accounts that are ideologically aligned with their own views. Our results suggest that studies relying on the retweet graphs overestimate the echo chamber effects and exposure to polarized information.