DOCSLIB.ORG

Beyond Filter Bubbles and Echo Chambers: the Integrative Potential of the Internet Mahrt, Merja

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Beyond Filter Bubbles and Echo Chambers: the Integrative Potential of the Internet Mahrt, Merja www.ssoar.info Beyond Filter Bubbles and Echo Chambers: The Integrative Potential of the Internet Mahrt, Merja Erstveröffentlichung / Primary Publication Habilitationsschrift / habilitation treatise Empfohlene Zitierung / Suggested Citation: Mahrt, M. (2019). Beyond Filter Bubbles and Echo Chambers: The Integrative Potential of the Internet. (Digital Communication Research, 5). Berlin. https://doi.org/10.17174/dcr.v5.0 Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Dieser Text wird unter einer CC BY Lizenz (Namensnennung) zur This document is made available under a CC BY Licence Verfügung gestellt. Nähere Auskünfte zu den CC-Lizenzen finden (Attribution). For more Information see: Sie hier: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.de Mahrt Are online audiences today fragmented into echo chambers or ilter Merja Mahrt bubbles? Do users only see what digital platforms (like search engines or social media) let them see? And if so, what are the consequences for the cohesion of a society? Concerns like these abound in recent years. They attest to widely held assumptions about a negative inluence of digital media or even the Internet in general on society. Empirical stud- ies on these phenomena are, however, not as unequivocal. To under- stand why results from previous research are so far inconclusive, this study investigates the role of the Internet for social integration from a more general point of view. The integrative potential of the Internet is assessed to compare it with other media and ultimately better understand to what degree and due to which factors the Internet may or may not help bring society to- Beyond Filter Bubbles gether. Using survey data, clickstream data on actual usage of websites, and data on content structures, the present work investigates how user behavior and structural features of the Internet determine its positive and Echo Chambers or negative effects on social integration. The results reveal that the In- ternet in general is not as bad as popular accounts of digital fragmenta- The Integrative Potential of the Internet tion may suggest. How much integrative potential can be realized via Beyond Filter Bubbles and Echo Chambers online offerings, however, depends on numerous factors on the side of the users as well as content and platform providers. Volume 5 dx.doi.org/10.17174/dcr.v5.0 ISSN 2198-7610 Digital digitalcommunicationresearch.de ISBN 978-3-945681-05-3 Communication Research.de 5 Digital Communication Research Edited by Martin Emmer, Christian Katzenbach, Christian Pentzold, Christina Schumann, Monika Taddicken, Martin Welker, & Jens Wolling Volume 5 Merja Mahrt Beyond Filter Bubbles and Echo Chambers The Integrative Potential of the Internet Editorial ofice of Digital Communication Research Christian Strippel, M.A. Freie Universität Berlin Institute for Media and Communication Studies Garystrasse 55 14195 Berlin, Germany [email protected] Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliograie; detailed bibliographic data are available at http://dnb.d-nb.de. ISSN 2198-7610 ISBN 978-3-945681-05-3 Habilitation thesis, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf 2017 The persistent long-term archiving of this book is carried out with the helpf of the Social Science Open Access Repository and da|ra, the DOI registration service in Germany for social science and economic data. DOI 10.17174/dcr.v5.0 A printed version of this book can be ordered from Böhland & Schremmer Verlag, Berlin: www.boehland-schremmer-verlag.de This book is published open access and licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY 4.0): http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Berlin, 2019 digitalcommunicationresearch.de Contents 1 Introduction 13 2 A brief overview of the integrative functions of media 17 2.1 What makes media integrative 19 2.1.1 Media reach large audiences 19 2.1.2 Content (I): Media transport messages about social reality 21 2.1.3 Content (II): Media enable large public spheres 23 2.2 Integration at different levels of society 25 2.3 Fragmentation and other negative effects of television 29 2.4 Summary 31 3 Fears about a loss of integration due to the Internet 35 3.1 Technical properties of the Internet 35 3.2 Online content 38 3.3 Online use 40 3.4 Effects of online structures and use 44 3.5 Summary 46 4 Measurement of media effects on social integration 49 4.1 Conversation-related measures 49 4.2 Social integration as a characteristic of individuals 51 4.3 Fragmentation of audiences 56 4.4 Summary 59 5 How to analyze the integrative potential of the Internet 62 5.1 Open questions 62 5.2 Aim and scope of the study 64 5 6 Survey: Media use and social integration 69 6.1 Method 70 6.2 Relationships between media use and integration 76 6.2.1 Results 79 6.2.2 Summary and discussion 85 6.3 Online repertoires and types of users 90 6.3.1 Results 93 6.3.2 Summary and discussion 102 7 Analysis of clickstream data: Online use within platforms 106 7.1 Massively overlapping culture online? 106 7.2 Use of content items in different media 108 7.3 Research questions 112 7.4 Method 115 7.5 Results 117 7.5.1 Overlap of usage on Spiegel Online 118 7.5.2 Overlap of usage on YouTube 125 7.6 Summary and discussion 131 8 Content analysis: Online content structures 137 8.1 Content on Spiegel Online 139 8.2 Content on YouTube 139 8.3 Research questions 141 8.4 Method 145 8.5 Results 147 8.5.1 Content structure of Spiegel Online articles 147 8.5.2 Content structure of top 10 YouTube videos 150 8.6 Summary and discussion 154 6 9 Conclusion 161 9.1 The integrative potential of the Internet versus mass media 162 9.1.1 Online versus other content 166 9.1.2 Patterns of online usage 169 9.1.3 Summary: The dependence of integrative potentials on structures and user behavior 171 9.2 Limitations 174 9.3 Outlook 177 References 180 APPENDIx Appendix A: Questionnaire (Chapter 6) 211 Appendix B: Codebook for Spiegel Online content (Chapters 7 and 8) 228 Appendix C: Codebook for YouTube videos (Chapter 8) 236 7 FIGURES Figure 1: Frequency of using online sources for information on news and current events by type of information use 94 Figure 2: Frequency of using media by type of information use 95 Figure 3: Number of media content items remembered by type of information use 95 Figure 4: Frequency of using online sources for entertainment by type of entertainment use 97 Figure 5: Frequency of using media by type of entertainment use 98 Figure 6: Number of media content items remembered by type of entertainment use 99 Figure 7: Association of topics on Spiegel Online via shared usership 123 Figure 8: Association of videos on YouTube via shared usership 128 8 TABLES Table 1: Selected media content items and their level of salience 72 Table 2: Awareness of media content 80 Table 3: Correlations between media use, integrative status, and content awareness 82 Table 4: Regression analysis for content awareness 84 Table 5: Regression analysis for content awareness among Facebook users 86 Table 6: Characteristics of types of information users 96 Table 7: Characteristics of types of entertainment users 100 Table 8: Overlap between type of online information and online entertainment use 101 Table 9: Characteristics of the sample of online users 116 Table 10: Most popular topics on Spiegel Online 119 Table 11: Distribution of content accessed by Spiegel Online users 120 Table 12: Association of topics on Spiegel Online via shared usership 122 Table 13: Characteristics of topic-speciic audiences on Spiegel Online 124 Table 14: Most popular channels on YouTube 126 Table 15: Association of videos on YouTube via shared usership 129 Table 16: Characteristics of genre-speciic audiences on YouTube 130 Table 17: Distribution of content published on Spiegel Online 148 Table 18: Top 10 topics on Spiegel Online in June 2014 149 Table 19: Genres and topics of top 10 YouTube videos in Germany, June 2014 151 Table 20: Structure of authorship of top 10 YouTube videos in Germany, June 2014 153 9 Acknowledgment The idea for this thesis irst developed about seven years ago, and it took a few twists and turns before I completed my habilitation in Communication and Me- dia Studies in November 2017. During this time, I worked as a research associate at the Department for Social Sciences at Heinrich Heine University. I am deeply grateful for the numerous types of support I received during this time. A grant from the university’s Strategic Research Fund enabled me to conduct my research independently and, in addition to the originally planned survey, to also accom- modate for the clickstream analyses, which appeared more and more pressing to me while working on digital fragmentation. The generous and lexible handling of grants for junior researchers at my university is a large part of what has made this work possible in the present form. Through discussions of drafts and papers, but also beyond in everyday aca- demic liFe, my colleagues From Communication and Media Studies have been an important part oF bringing this work to Fruition. I wish to thank Ralph Weiß in particular for his criticism and encouragement as well as an academic free- dom that I value very highly. I am very grateful to Jasmin Voigthaus and es- pecially Laura Leißner For their patience and conscientiousness as research assistants. Beyond my colleagues “at home,” many people have accompanied my work over the last years, discussing topics from academic careers in general to very speciic issues of how to determine overlap versus fragmentation in online usage data.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Free, Hateful, and Posted: Rethinking First Amendment Protection of Hate Speech in a Social Media World
    Boston College Law Review Volume 60 Issue 7 Article 6 10-30-2019 Free, Hateful, and Posted: Rethinking First Amendment Protection of Hate Speech in a Social Media World Lauren E. Beausoleil Boston College Law School, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/bclr Part of the First Amendment Commons, and the Internet Law Commons Recommended Citation Lauren E. Beausoleil, Free, Hateful, and Posted: Rethinking First Amendment Protection of Hate Speech in a Social Media World, 60 B.C.L. Rev. 2100 (2019), https://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/bclr/vol60/iss7/6 This Notes is brought to you for free and open access by the Law Journals at Digital Commons @ Boston College Law School. It has been accepted for inclusion in Boston College Law Review by an authorized editor of Digital Commons @ Boston College Law School. For more information, please contact [email protected]. FREE, HATEFUL, AND POSTED: RETHINKING FIRST AMENDMENT PROTECTION OF HATE SPEECH IN A SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD Abstract: Speech is meant to be heard, and social media allows for exaggeration of that fact by providing a powerful means of dissemination of speech while also dis- torting one’s perception of the reach and acceptance of that speech. Engagement in online “hate speech” can interact with the unique characteristics of the Internet to influence users’ psychological processing in ways that promote violence and rein- force hateful sentiments. Because hate speech does not squarely fall within any of the categories excluded from First Amendment protection, the United States’ stance on hate speech is unique in that it protects it.
    [Show full text]
  • What Echo Chamber? Reviewing the Evidence
    Echo Chamber? What Echo Chamber? Reviewing the Evidence Prof. Axel Bruns Digital Media Research Centre Queensland University of Technology Brisbane, Australia [email protected] @snurb_dot_info Abstract The success of political movements that appear to be immune to any factual evidence that contradicts their claims – from the Brexiteers to the ‘alt‐right’, neo‐fascist groups supporting Donald Trump – has reinvigorated claims that social media spaces constitute so‐called ‘filter bubbles’ or ‘echo chambers’. But while such claims may appear intuitively true to politicians and journalists – who have themselves been accused of living in filter bubbles (Bradshaw 2016) –, the evidence that ordinary users experience their everyday social media environments as echo chambers is far more limited. For instance, a 2016 Pew Center study has shown that only 23% of U.S. users on Facebook and 17% on Twitter now say with confidence that most of their contacts’ views are similar to their own. 20% have changed their minds about a political or social issue because of interactions on social media (Duggan and Smith 2016). Similarly, large‐scale studies of follower and interaction networks on Twitter (e.g. Bruns et al., 2014) show that national Twitterspheres are often thoroughly interconnected and facilitate the flow of information across boundaries of personal ideology and interest, except for a few especially hardcore partisan communities. Building on new, comprehensive data from a project that maps and tracks interactions between 4 million accounts in the Australian Twittersphere, this paper explores in detail the evidence for the existence of echo chambers in that country. It thereby moves the present debate beyond a merely anecdotal footing, and offers a more reliable assessment of the ‘echo chamber’ threat.
    [Show full text]
  • Echo Chambers
    Echo Chambers J. Anthony Cookson, Joseph E. Engelberg and William Mullins* October 7, 2020 Abstract We find evidence of selective exposure to confirmatory information among 300,000 users on the investor social network StockTwits. Self-described bulls are 5 times more likely to follow a user with a bullish view of the same stock than self-described bears. This tendency exists even among professional investors and is strongest for investors who trade on their beliefs. Selective exposure generates differences in the newsfeeds of bulls and bears: over a 50-day period, a bull will see 70 more bullish messages and 15 fewer bearish messages than a bear over the same period. Moreover, beliefs formed in these “echo-chambers” are associated with lower ex- post returns. Finally, we show that selective exposure creates “information silos” in which the diversity of received signals is high across users’ newsfeeds but is low within users’ newsfeeds and that this siloing of information is positively related to trading volume. *Cookson is at the Leeds School of Business at University of Colorado-Boulder ([email protected]). En- gelberg is at the Rady School of Management, UC San Diego ([email protected]). Mullins is at the Rady School of Management, UC San Diego ([email protected]). This draft has benefited from workshop and conference presentations at Georgetown University, Finance in the Cloud III, University of Colorado, and UC San Diego. 1 Introduction Traditional models in finance – where investors have common priors, observe the same public sig- nals, and update their beliefs according to Bayes’ rule – have a difficult time explaining the high trading volume observed in financial markets.
    [Show full text]
  • Opinion Forming in the Digital Age
    Opinion Forming in the Digital Age Fake News, Echo Chambers and Populism - Key Themes, Concerns & Recommendations for European Research and Innovation Version 1.0 – October 2018 Editors: Steve Taylor1, Brian Pickering, Paul Grace, Michael Boniface University of Southampton IT Innovation Centre, UK Expert Panel2: Vian Bakir Andrew McStay danah boyd Hugo Mercier Sven Engesser Miriam Metzger Robert Epstein Francesca Polletta Nayla Fawzi Walter Quattrociocchi Philip Fernbach Steven Sloman Dana R. Fisher Dan Sperber Beth Gharrity Gardner Niels Spierings Kristof Jacobs Claire Wardle Susan Jacobson Fabiana Zollo Benjamin Krämer Arkaitz Zubiaga Adam Kucharski 1 Contact author: [email protected] 2 Full positions and affiliations of the expert panel are included within. The Internet provides fast and ubiquitous communication that enables all kinds of communities and provides citizens with easy access to vast amounts of information, although the information is not necessarily verified and may present a distorted view of real events or facts. The Internet’s power as an instant source of mass information can be used to influence opinions, which can have far- reaching consequences. This report’s purpose is to provide input into the advisory processes that determine European support for research into the effects and management of Fake News (e.g. deliberate misinformation), Echo Chambers (e.g. closed communities where biases can be reinforced through lack of diversity in opinions), and the Internet’s influence on social and political movements such as Populism; to provide insight into how innovation that takes these aspects into account can be supported. To address this aim, this report concerns socio-technical implications of the Internet related to the impact of closed communities and misinformation and makes recommendations derived from a consultation with domain experts concerning the research needed to address specific challenges.
    [Show full text]
  • Decoupling Search Topic and Popularity Ranking: Insights on Online Echo Chambers
    MIT IDE RESEARCH BRIEF VOL. 2017.8 DECOUPLING SEARCH TOPIC AND POPULARITY RANKING: INSIGHTS ON ONLINE ECHO CHAMBERS Sagit Bar-Gill and Neil Gandal Just as sound reverberates in an enclosed space, so do online environment for content exploration, we broke down opinions and information “bounce” among social circles. search into two dimensions — content topic and content Since “birds of a feather flock together,” these social popularity. We then looked at the ways individuals moved circles consist mostly of like-minded individuals, making through the material. We observed, for instance, the weight it harder for dissenting views to permeate our discourse, that users placed on their own interests versus those of and creating an echo of our own information and views the crowd, and how these patterns relate to an individual’s (1). This echo chamber phenomenon has drawn growing characteristics, such as how social they regard themselves concern in post-election USA, post-Brexit UK, and pretty and whether they try to influence others in their social much everywhere in our increasingly connected world (2– circles (what we term “opinion leaders”). 4). Echo chambers have always been around as a natural result of our homophilous social choices. But as our social In our experimental environment, susceptibility to echo networking continues its shift online, the echoes seem to be chambers is well-proxied by: (I) conducting relatively getting worse (2, 4, 5). little exploration in the search process, and (II) relying on popularity in content choice. Who is responsible for our online echo chambers – ourselves or filtering and ranking algorithms beyond our Therefore, users who conduct little exploration and rely control? Filtering and ranking algorithms are implemented more heavily on the crowd’s previous choices will, over in many of our online environments, creating much- time, see less diverse content.
    [Show full text]
  • Ventriloquism Or an Echo Chamber? Measuring the Strength of House Members’ Rhetoric in Local Newspapers
    Ventriloquism or an Echo Chamber? Measuring the Strength of House Members’ Rhetoric in Local Newspapers. Michael K. Romano Department of Political Science Georgia Southern University P.O. Box 8101, Carroll Building 2205 Statesboro, GA 30460 (912) 478-0838 (phone) (912) 478-5348 (fax) [email protected] Paper prepared for the 2015 Midwest Political Science Association Meeting. Chicago IL. April15-19, 2014 Ventriloquism or an Echo Chamber? Measuring the Strength of House Members’ Rhetoric in Local Newspapers. Political elites have been shown to excel at manipulating the information environment. Theories about press control by elites vary. Some argue that actors manipulate the media like a ventriloquist, using the press to restate their rhetoric verbatim, while others argue that journalists act with more agency when deciding the news. I examine the ability of members of the House of Representatives to manipulate news about their work in Washington. Members have an incentive to promote themselves in order to control the public's perception and attempt to leverage the local press through mediated homestyles; cultivating news agencies as a constituency using press releases that are ready-made for news consumption. The extent to which news articles echo press statements will vary depending on the complexity of the issue and the clarity of a member's expressed agenda. To test this relationship, data on press releases is gathered and is matched with corresponding district news coverage. Press releases and matched articles are examined using plagiarism detection software to evaluate overlapping use of representatives' rhetoric. The media system in the United States is tasked with taking the millions of signals, events, actions and non-actions of political actors and condensing them down into meaningful and understandable stories that can be absorbed easily by the populace.
    [Show full text]
  • Echo Chambers
    AVOIDING THE ECHO CHAMBER ABOUT ECHO CHAMBERS: Why selective exposure to like-minded political news is less prevalent than you think — ANDREW GUESS BRENDAN NYHAN Department of Politics Department of Government knightfoundation.org Princeton University Dartmouth College [email protected] [email protected] BENJAMIN LYONS JASON REIFLER | Department of Politics Department of Politics @knightfdn University of Exeter University of Exeter [email protected] [email protected] CONTENTS AVOIDING THE ECHO CHAMBER ABOUT ECHO CHAMBERS CHAMBER ABOUT ECHO THE ECHO AVOIDING 4 THE ECHO CHAMBERS CRITIQUE 6 SELECTIVE EXPOSURE: A MORE COMPLEX STORY 13 THE IMPORTANCE OF SOCIAL CONTEXT 15 CONCLUSION | 17 REFERENCES Contents knightfoundation.org | @knightfdn 2 / 25 Is the expansion of media choice good for democracy? Not according to critics who decry “echo chambers,” “filter bubbles,” and “information cocoons” — the highly polarized, ideologically homogeneous forms of news and media consumption that are facilitated by technology. However, these claims overstate the prevalence and severity of these patterns, which at most AVOIDING THE ECHO CHAMBER ABOUT ECHO CHAMBERS CHAMBER ABOUT ECHO THE ECHO AVOIDING capture the experience of a minority of the public. In this review essay, we summarize the most important findings of the academic literature about where and how Americans get news and information. We focus particular attention on how much consumers engage in selective exposure to media content that is consistent with their political beliefs and the extent to which this pattern is exacerbated by technology. As we show, the data frequently contradict or at least complicate the “echo chambers” narrative, which has ironically been amplified and distorted in a kind of echo chamber effect.
    [Show full text]
  • Essays on Digital Self-Continuity Conceptualization and Empirical Investigations
    Clemson University TigerPrints All Dissertations Dissertations August 2020 Sense of Self in the Context of Digitalization: Essays on Digital Self-Continuity Conceptualization and Empirical Investigations Wenxi Pu Clemson University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/all_dissertations Recommended Citation Pu, Wenxi, "Sense of Self in the Context of Digitalization: Essays on Digital Self-Continuity Conceptualization and Empirical Investigations" (2020). All Dissertations. 2658. https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/all_dissertations/2658 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations at TigerPrints. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TigerPrints. For more information, please contact [email protected]. SENSE OF SELF IN THE CONTEXT OF DIGITALIZATION: ESSAYS ON DIGITAL SELF-CONTINUITY CONCEPTUALIZATION AND EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATIONS A Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of Clemson University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Business Administration by Wenxi Pu August 2020 Accepted by: Philip Roth, Committee Chair Jason Bennett Thatcher, Committee Chair Michelle Carter Janis Miller i ABSTRACT Digital technologies have deeply weaved into the infrastructures of society and organizations, fundamentally transforming how individuals interact with each other and, consequently, transforming how individuals verify and express their sense of self. Rooted in this context, this dissertation explores two hitherto largely ignored areas in Information Systems (IS) research with two essays related to the theme of self and identity. The first essay investigates whether and how stigmatized self presented on social media (e.g., Facebook and LinkedIn) impacts a job applicant’s hireability ratings.
    [Show full text]
  • Political Discourse on Social Media: Echo Chambers, Gatekeepers, and the Price of Bipartisanship
    Political Discourse on Social Media: Echo Chambers, Gatekeepers, and the Price of Bipartisanship Kiran Garimella Gianmarco De Francisci Morales Aalto University Qatar Computing Research Institute Espoo, Finland Doha, Qatar [email protected] [email protected] Aristides Gionis Michael Mathioudakis Aalto University University of Helsinki Espoo, Finland Helsinki, Finland [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT by people and news sources who express only opinions they agree Echo chambers, i.e., situations where one is exposed only to opin- with. It is telling that Facebook and ex-U.S. Presidents have recently 1 ions that agree with their own, are an increasing concern for the voiced such concerns. If echo chambers exist, then they might political discourse in many democratic countries. This paper stud- hamper the deliberative process in democracy [36]. ies the phenomenon of political echo chambers on social media. In this paper, we study the degree to which echo chambers exist We identify the two components in the phenomenon: the opinion in political discourse on Twitter, and how they are structured. We that is shared, and the “chamber” (i.e., the social network) that approach the study in terms of two components: the opinion that is allows the opinion to “echo” (i.e., be re-shared in the network) – shared by a user, and the “chamber”, i.e., the social network around and examine closely at how these two components interact. We the user, which allows the opinion to “echo” back to the user as it define a production and consumption measure for social-media is also shared by others.
    [Show full text]
  • Download Preprint
    Running head: POLITICAL LANDSCAPE OF U.S. TWITTERVERSE 1 The Political Landscape of the U.S. Twitterverse Subhayan Mukerjee1, Kokil Jaidka1, and Yphtach Lelkes2 1National University of Singapore 2University of Pennsylvania POLITICAL LANDSCAPE OF U.S. TWITTERVERSE 2 Abstract Prior research suggests that Twitter users in the United States are more politically engaged and more partisan compared to the American citizenry – a public that is otherwise characterized by low levels of political knowledge and disinterest in political affairs. This study seeks to understand this disconnect by conducting an observational analysis of the most popular accounts on American Twitter. We identify opinion leaders by drawing a random sample of ordinary American Twitter users and observing whom they follow. We estimate the ideological leaning and political relevance of these opinion leaders as well as crowd-source how they are perceived by ordinary Americans. We find little evidence that American Twitter is as politicized as is made out to be, with politics and hard news outlets constituting a small subset of these opinion leaders. We find no evidence of polarization among these opinion leaders either. While certain professional categories such as political pundits and political figures are more polarized than others, the overall polarization dissipates further when we factor in the rate at which the opinion leaders tweet: a large number of vocal non-partisan opinion leaders drowns out the partisan voices on the platform. Our results suggest that the degree to which Twitter is political, has likely been overstated in the past. Our findings have implications about how we use Twitter to represent public opinion in the United States.
    [Show full text]
  • THE ECHO CHAMBER Results, Management and the Humanitarian Effectiveness Agenda
    THE ECHO CHAMBER Results, Management and the Humanitarian Effectiveness Agenda Juliano Fiori, Fernando Espada, Jessica Field, Sophie Dicker The Humanitarian Affairs Team Save the Children THE ECHO CHAMBER Results, Management and the Humanitarian Effectiveness Agenda Juliano Fiori, Fernando Espada, Jessica Field, Sophie Dicker The Humanitarian Affairs Team Save the Children This report has been produced as a discussion paper by the Humanitarian Affairs Team in partnership with the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute and does not reflect Save the Children policy CONTENTS First published 2016. ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS 5 © The Save the Children Fund 2016. FOREWORD 7 The Save the Children Fund is a charity registered in England and Wales (213890) and Scotland (SC039570). Registered company No. PREFACE 9 178159. A NOTE ON THE WORLD HUMANITARIAN SUMMIT: This publication is copyright, but may be reproduced by any method without fee or prior permission for teaching purposes, but not for resale. SOLUTION OR SYMPTOM? 17 For copying in any other circumstances, prior written permission must be obtained by the publisher. INTRODUCTION: AN APPETITE FOR REFORM Suggested citation: Fiori, Juliano, Fernando Espada, Jessica Field, From ‘duty’ to ‘results’: the new humanitarianism and Sophie Dicker. The Echo Chamber: Results, Management and the and consequentialism 19 Humanitarian Affairs Agenda. London: Humanitarian Affairs Team & Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute, 2016. Rwanda: the ‘end of the age of innocence’ 21 Contact the Humanitarian
    [Show full text]
  • Echo Chambers Exist! (But They're Full of Opposing Views)
    Echo Chambers Exist. J Bright et al. 2020. Draft. 1 Echo Chambers Exist! (But They’re Full of Opposing Views) Jonathan Bright, Nahema Marchal, Bharath Ganesh, Stevan Rudinac Correspondence: [email protected] Abstract: The theory of echo chambers, which suggests that online political discussions take place in conditions of ideological homogeneity, has recently gained popularity as an explanation for patterns of political polarization and radicalization observed in many democratic countries. However, while micro-level experimental work has shown evidence that individuals may gravitate towards information that supports their beliefs, recent macro-level studies have cast doubt on whether this tendency generates echo chambers in practice, instead suggesting that cross-cutting exposures are a common feature of digital life. In this article, we offer an explanation for these diverging results. Building on cognitive dissonance theory, and making use of observational trace data taken from an online radical right website, we explore how individuals in an ideological “echo chamber” engage with opposing viewpoints. We show that this type of exposure, far from being detrimental to radical online discussions, is actually a core feature of such spaces that encourages people to stay engaged. The most common “echoes” in this echo chamber are in fact the sound of opposing viewpoints being undermined and marginalized. Hence echo chambers exist not only in spite of but thanks to the unifying presence of oppositional viewpoints. We conclude with reflections on policy implications of our study for those seeking to promote a more moderate political internet. Keywords: echo chambers, cognitive dissonance, online politics, extremism, selective exposure Acknowledgments: Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Oxford Internet Institute brown bag seminar and the ICS Lisbon Sparc Seminar series.
    [Show full text]