The Anatomy of Brexit Debate on Facebook

TL;DR

This study analyzes Brexit-related news consumption on Facebook, revealing the emergence of polarized echo chambers, and introduces a new method combining topic extraction and sentiment analysis to understand group dynamics and perception differences.

Contribution

It provides a large-scale analysis of Brexit discussions on Facebook and introduces a novel technique for analyzing topic and sentiment differences within echo chambers.

Findings

Two distinct communities of news outlets emerged.

Polarization affects how topics are presented and perceived.

Significant differences in emotional responses between echo chambers.

Abstract

Nowadays users get informed and shape their opinion through social media. However, the disintermediated access to contents does not guarantee quality of information. Selective exposure and confirmation bias, indeed, have been shown to play a pivotal role in content consumption and information spreading. Users tend to select information adhering (and reinforcing) their worldview and to ignore dissenting information. This pattern elicits the formation of polarized groups -- i.e., echo chambers -- where the interaction with like-minded people might even reinforce polarization. In this work we address news consumption around Brexit in UK on Facebook. In particular, we perform a massive analysis on more than 1 Million users interacting with Brexit related posts from the main news providers between January and July 2016. We show that consumption patterns elicit the emergence of two distinct communities of news outlets. Furthermore, to better characterize inner group dynamics, we introduce a new technique which combines automatic topic extraction and sentiment analysis. We compare how the same topics are presented on posts and the related emotional response on comments finding significant differences in both echo chambers and that polarization influences the perception of topics. Our results provide important insights about the determinants of polarization and evolution of core narratives on online debating.