CS 6474 Social Compung: Polarizaon and Selecve Exposure

Munmun De Choudhury [email protected] Week 13 | November 14, 2016

Echo Chambers Online?: Politically Motivated Selective Exposure among Internet News Users Summary

• The paper performs a survey study to examine how online news reading affects opinion reinforcement • 700 people were asked to read news on two news sites – Individuals more like to read news stories that reinforces their opinions than those which challenge them • Important finding: – “Having decided to view a news story, evidence of an aversion to opinion challenges disappears: There is no evidence that individuals abandon news stories that contain information with which they disagree.” – People don’t actively seek to exclude information that challenges their opinions, unlike what popular knowledge indicated Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook Summary

How did we get here? What do you think was the reasoning behind online platforms promoting/encouraging polarization or selective exposure? Perhaps one of the biggest strengths of social computing systems is that they allow people to find like minded others and form communities. This seems to be at odds with the dangers of polarization. Influence in the political sphere: 62% of adults in the US use social media to consume news, and 18% of adults are frequent consumers – Pew Internet http://www.internetphenomena.com/2016/11/us-election-2016-tv-trumps-the-internet/ Figure 1: Community structure of political blogs (expanded set), shown using utilizing the GUESS visual- ization and analysis tool[2]. The colors reflect political orientation, red for conservative, and blue for liberal. Orange links go from liberal to conservative, and purple ones from conservative to liberal. The size of each blog reflects the number of other blogs that link to it.

Because of bloggers’ ability to identify and frame break- neighborhoods of Atrios, a popular liberal blog, and In- ing news, many mainstream media sources keep a close eye stapundit, a popular conservative blog. He found the In- on the best known political blogs. A number of mainstream stapundit neighborhood to include many more blogs than news sources have started to discuss and even to host blogs. the Atrios one, and observed no overlap in the URLs cited In an online survey asking editors, reporters, columnists and between the two neighborhoods. The lack of overlap in lib- publishers to each list the “top 3” blogs they read, Drezner eral and conservative interests has previously been observed and Farrell [4] identified a short list of dominant “A-list” in purchases of political books on Amazon.com [8]. This blogs. Just 10 of the most popular blogs accounted for over brings about the question of whether we are witnessing a half the blogs on the journalists’ lists. They also found that, cyberbalkanization [11, 13] of the Internet, where the prolif- besides capturing most of the attention of the mainstream eration of specialized online news sources allows people with media, the most popular political blogs also get a dispro- different political leanings to be exposed only to information portionate number of links from other blogs. Shirky [12] in agreement with their previously held views. Yale law pro- observed the same effect for blogs in general and Hindman fessor Jack Balkin provides a counter-argument7 by pointing et al. [7] found it to hold for political websites focusing on out that such segregation is unlikely in the blogosphere be- various issues. cause bloggers systematically comment on each other, even While these previous studies focused on the inequality of if only to voice disagreement. citation links for political blogs overall, there has been com- In this paper we address both hypotheses by examining in paratively little study of subcommunities of political blogs. a systematic way the linking patterns and discussion topics In the context of political websites, Hindman et al. [7] noted of political bloggers. In doing so, we not only measure the that, for example, those dealing with the issue of abortion, degree of interaction between liberal and conservative blogs, gun control, and the death penalties, contain subcommuni- but also uncover differences in the structure of the two com- ties of opposing views. In the case of the pro-choice and munities. Our data set includes the posts of 40 A-list blogs pro-life web communities, an earlier study [1] found pro-life over the period of two months preceding the U.S. Presiden- websites to be more densely linked than pro-choice ones. In tial Election of 2004. We also study a large network of over a study of a sample of the blogosphere, Herring et al.[6] dis- 1,000 political blogs based on a single day snapshot that in- covered densely interlinked (non-political) blog communities cludes blogrolls (the list of links to other blogs frequently focusing on the topics of Catholicism and homeschooling, as found in sidebars), and so presents a more static picture of well as a core network of A-list blogs, some of them political. a broader blogosphere. Recently, Butts and Cross [3] studied the response in the From both samples we find that liberal and conservative structure of networks of political blogs to polling data and blogs did indeed have different lists of favorite news sources, election campaign events. In another political blog study, Welsch [15] gathered a single-day snapshot of the network 7http://balkin.blogspot.com/2004 01 18 balkin archive.html#107480769112109137 salon.com online.wsj.com Left 1 Digbys Blog 2 James Walcott opinionjournal.com In contrast, the top news articles cited by right leaning Terry Mcauliffe 3 Pandagon Right bloggers are: Laura Bush tnr.com 4 blog.johnkerry.com Left Tim Russert 5 Oliver Willis news.bbc.co.uk Right 1. CBS News article on forged memos 6 America Blog John Mccain Zell Miller nypost.com 2. Time Magazine poll: Bush opens double-digit7 Crooked Timber lead on 8 Daily Kos Colin Powell slate.msn.com (A) post convention bounce Howard Dean 9 American Prospect cbsnews.com 3. National Review article refuting missing10 E explosivesschaton case Ronald Reagan 11 Wonkette Donald Rumsfeld 1 2 21 foxnews.com 4. ABC News article refuting missing explosives12 Talk Left case Yasser Arafat 3 13 Political Wire Al Gore guardian.co.uk 5. Washington22 Post article23 on Kerry’s proposal to com- 4 14 Talking Points Memo Mary Cheney promise5 with Iran24 on nuclear27 technology. apnews.myway.com 6 15 Matthew Yglesias Karl Rove 7 25 Michaelwashi Moorengtontimes.com 8 26 28 16 Washington Monthly 10 29 17 MyDD Bill Clinton 9 11 30 usatoday.com 18 Juan Cole John Edwards 13 12 35 32 19 Left Coaster Dan Rather boston.com 31 17 20 Bradford DeLong Dick Cheney 15 14 Right latimes.com 18 30 33 35 36 16 34 21 JawaRepoLeftrt 02004006008001000cnn.com 19 25 22 Voka Pundit # mentions 38 39 nationalreview.com 37 23 Roger L Simon 20 24 Tim Blair c.msn.com 20 40 msnb (B) 25 Andrew Sullivan 15 news.yahoo.com 26 Instapundit Figure 6: Mentions of political figures in liberal 27 Blogs for Bush washingtonpost.com # weblog# posts 10 vs. conservative weblogs (excludes George W. Bush 28 Little Green Footballs nytimes.com 5 29 Belmont Club and John Kerry) 30 Captain’s Quarters 050010001500 0 31 Powerline 32 Hugh Hewitt # citations from weblog posts 33 INDC Journal 2004 34 Real Clear Politics 9/5/2004 statistics indicate that our A-list political bloggers, like main- 8/29/2004 9/12/ 9/19/20049/26/200410/3/2004 11/7/2004 10/10/200410/17/200410/24/200410/31/200435 Winds of Change 36 Allahpundit stream journalists (and like most of us) support their posi- Date 37 Michelle Malkin tions by criticizing those of the political figures they dislike. 38 WizBang An interesting topic for further study would be to compare 39 Dean’s World Figure 4: Most linked to news sources by the top 40 Volokh how20 balanced conservative bloggers’ presentation and top of the 20 facts liberal are com- blogs during (C) Figure 5: Time series chart: # posts discussing the pared with that of mainstream media journalists. CBS forged documents, right vs. left. To8/29/2004 create this data, - 11/15/2004. we ran a person name extractor over the sets of left-leaning weblog posts and right-leaning weblog posts and counted up occurrences of the same name. We A time series chart further shows how quickly and strongly Figure 3: Aggregate blog citation behavior prior excluded the names of weblog authors for our top 40 weblogs. conservative bloggers responded to forged CBS documents We then grouped together by hand different variants of the to the 2004(Figure election. 5). The conservative Color corresponds bloggers saw Dan to Rather’s politi- Figure 4 shows the most popular online news sites, and same name. The person name extractor has a recall of about cal orientation,report as an size attempt reflects by the left the to numberdiscredit President of citations Bush. the proportion of liberal and conservative blogs linking to 90%, so it is to be expected that one to three major political They acted quickly to debunk the report, with the charge led received from the top 40 blogs, and line thickness figuresthem are withinmissing from the thetop ranking. 20 liberal and the top 20 conservative reflectsby the PowerLine number and of seconded citations by Wizbangblog between and two others. blogs. In blogs. As our analysis of the home pages of the larger set contrast, the pick-up among liberal bloggers occurred later, (A) Allwith directed lower volume. edges The are most shown. vocal left (B) leaning Edges bloggers having on 3.5of Back political to the blogs Greater will show Political in Section Blogosphere 3.5, we find that Fox fewer thanthe subject 5 citations were TalkLeft in eitherand AMERICAblog. or both directions InNews addition and to the the A-list National political Review blogs, there receive are hundreds the majority of their are removed. (C) Edges having fewer than 25 com- of otherlinks blogs from in the political conservative blogosphere. weblogs, We compared while Salon receives 3.4 Occurrences of names of political figures bined citations are removed. theirover interests 86% in of mainstream its links from media liberal based on blogs. the links ex- Figure 6 shows the relative number of mentions of the tracted from their pages, and found these closely mirrored most cited political figures in our set of top 40 political we- those ofWithin the top the 40 blogs. set of Fox top news political and the blogs, National we also Re- find that the blogs. This chart excludes George W. Bush and John Kerry, viewNY receive Post, 89% the and WSJ 92% of Opinion their links, Journal respectively, and from the Washington excludingwith direct 8071 citations and 8011 mentions,between respectively,the blogs (where in order the to im- con- conservatives,Times receive while Salon the receives large majority 91% of its links of their from lib- links from right servativeprove blogs readability. have a clear Interestingly lead), the enough, links the capture right leaning echoing eralleaning blogs. The blogs, New York while Times the and LA Washington Times, the Post New are Republic and of some externalbloggers account sources for directly, 59% of mentions but the of John echoing Kerry, between while thethe most Wall balanced, Street with Journal the Washington are predominantly Post being slightly linked to by left the blogsthe only left indirectly. account for 53% To of measure mentions textual of George similarity Bush. be- favored by conservatives (55 to 40), while the NYT was al- The chart shows that some political figures are the fo- mostleaning even, with blogs. 5 more The liberals remaining than conservatives top-linked linking media sources are tween blogs,cus of we attention identified of primarily phrases one that side are of mostthe political informative spec- to it.fairly We noticed evenly that cited some by news the sources left and often the linked right. to by with respecttrum. to For a example, background the following model figures of term are frequenciescited by name in bloggersThe on their actual sidebars news are article cited relatively citation less behavior frequently of the A-List weblog data.[14].predominantly Here by the we right: saw again Dan Rather, a tendency, Michael Moore,albeit a in blogpolitical posts. bloggers For example, further Salon di receivesfferentiates about the 60% media as sources at- weaker one,Yasser for Arafat the same and Terry phrases McAuli toff bee. On used the within other hand, commu- the manytended blogroll to links by bloggers as does the on New opposite York Times. sides of But the it political spec- nities thanleft between leaning bloggers them. account for most mentions of: Donald only receives 11% as many citations from blog posts, sug- Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Zell Miller and Tim Russert. gestingtrum. that Drilling its articles down, are not here discussed are the as often top news by A-list articles cited by These resultsNotice suggest the overall that pattern: although Democrats conservative are the ones bloggers more bloggers.left leaning bloggers: tend to moreoften cited actively by right-leaning comment bloggers, on one another’swhile Republicans posts, are this Links to non-blog and non-news sites reveal other prefer- behaviormore is not often accompanied mentioned by by left-leaning a greater bloggers. uniformity (While in otherZell ences that1. CBSthe two News categories poll of of blogs uncommitted have. In what follows, voters shows Kerry online contentMiller is they officially link a to. Democrat, Rather, he we spoke see at both the Republican communi- there are twowinning numbers 43% next to to 28% each site, the first being the Convention and has been outspokenly anti-Kerry). These number of links from liberal blogs, the second being the ties acting as mild echo chambers by frequently discussing 2. Sun Times article: Bob Novak predicts that George separate sets of web pages and news items. Bush will retreat from Iraq if reelected 3. CBS News article on forged memos 3.3 Interaction with mainstream media 4. New York Daily News article on Osama Bin Laden Even more common than links to other blogs are links to videotope, “gift” for the President news articles. Overall, the 20 left leaning bloggers cited the 5. Time Magazine poll: Bush opens double-digit lead on media 6,762 times, while the top 20 right leaning bloggers post convention bounce cited media 6,364, or about once every other post on average.

To what extent is polarization a new problem with social technologies, as against an offline phenomenon? What is the tentative interaction between selective exposure and people’s belief systems (wrt information consumption online)? Can we quantify it? Reading opinion-reinforcing content can have widespread impact on our perceptions what is real and what is fake. Could this impact our credibility perceptions? If you were to design a tool that works in tandem with Twitter or Facebook, how would you encourage diverse exposure? Remember, humans have “agency”, so polarization should have something to do beyond just homophily and network structure. How would you incorporate a user’s intrinsic attributes to discourage polarized views of information? http://graphics.wsj.com/blue-feed-red-feed/ What makes curbing polarization in social computing systems challenging? A deeper question (from TechCrunch): Why would [Facebook] want to change? And are people even ready for a fair Feed?