Political Discourse on Social Media: Echo Chambers, Gatekeepers, and the Price of Bipartisanship

TL;DR

This paper investigates political echo chambers on social media, revealing how users are exposed to like-minded opinions, the costs of bridging these chambers, and the roles of gatekeepers in shaping political discourse.

Contribution

It introduces measures for social media content sharing and consumption, analyzes the interaction between opinion sharing and network structure, and predicts user roles like partisans and gatekeepers.

Findings

Twitter users are largely exposed to similar political opinions.

Bridging echo chambers incurs a 'price of bipartisanship' in network centrality.

Gatekeepers consume diverse content but produce partisan content, influencing echo chamber formation.

Abstract

Echo chambers, i.e., situations where one is exposed only to opinions that agree with their own, are an increasing concern for the political discourse in many democratic countries. This paper studies the phenomenon of political echo chambers on social media. We identify the two components in the phenomenon: the opinion that is shared ('echo'), and the place that allows its exposure ('chamber' --- the social network), and examine closely at how these two components interact. We define a production and consumption measure for social-media users, which captures the political leaning of the content shared and received by them. By comparing the two, we find that Twitter users are, to a large degree, exposed to political opinions that agree with their own. We also find that users who try to bridge the echo chambers, by sharing content with diverse leaning, have to pay a 'price of bipartisanship' in terms of their network centrality and content appreciation. In addition, we study the role of 'gatekeepers', users who consume content with diverse leaning but produce partisan content (with a single-sided leaning), in the formation of echo chambers. Finally, we apply these findings to the task of predicting partisans and gatekeepers from social and content features. While partisan users turn out relatively easy to identify, gatekeepers prove to be more challenging.