Measuring Online Social Bubbles

TL;DR

This paper quantitatively demonstrates that social media and email foster narrower information exposure, creating social bubbles that limit diversity compared to search engines, with implications for understanding technology-driven polarization.

Contribution

First to empirically validate the existence of social bubbles at both collective and individual levels using large-scale data analysis.

Findings

People access less diverse sources via social media and email than search.

Strong correlation between collective and individual source diversity.

Social media use is associated with narrower information exposure.

Abstract

Social media have quickly become a prevalent channel to access information, spread ideas, and influence opinions. However, it has been suggested that social and algorithmic filtering may cause exposure to less diverse points of view, and even foster polarization and misinformation. Here we explore and validate this hypothesis quantitatively for the first time, at the collective and individual levels, by mining three massive datasets of web traffic, search logs, and Twitter posts. Our analysis shows that collectively, people access information from a significantly narrower spectrum of sources through social media and email, compared to search. The significance of this finding for individual exposure is revealed by investigating the relationship between the diversity of information sources experienced by users at the collective and individual level. There is a strong correlation between collective and individual diversity, supporting the notion that when we use social media we find ourselves inside "social bubbles". Our results could lead to a deeper understanding of how technology biases our exposure to new information.