Does Offline Political Segregation Affect the Filter Bubble? An Empirical Analysis of Information Diversity for Dutch and Turkish Twitter Users

TL;DR

This paper investigates how offline political segregation influences information diversity on Twitter, introducing new metrics and analyzing Turkish and Dutch users to understand minority access and viewpoint diversity.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive framework for analyzing viewpoint diversity on Twitter, incorporating political theory and applying it to cross-cultural case studies.

Findings

Minority users have limited reach among Turkish Twitter users.

New metrics reveal gaps in viewpoint diversity analysis.

Offline segregation impacts online information exposure.

Abstract

From a liberal perspective, pluralism and viewpoint diversity are seen as a necessary condition for a well-functioning democracy. Recently, there have been claims that viewpoint diversity is diminishing in online social networks, putting users in a "bubble", where they receive political information which they agree with. The contributions from our investigations are fivefold: (1) we introduce different dimensions of the highly complex value viewpoint diversity using political theory; (2) we provide an overview of the metrics used in the literature of viewpoint diversity analysis; (3) we operationalize new metrics using the theory and provide a framework to analyze viewpoint diversity in Twitter for different political cultures; (4) we share our results for a case study on minorities we performed for Turkish and Dutch Twitter users; (5) we show that minority users cannot reach a large percentage of Turkish Twitter users. With the last of these contributions, using theory from communication scholars and philosophers, we show how minority access is missing from the typical dimensions of viewpoint diversity studied by computer scientists and the impact it has on viewpoint diversity analysis.