(Anti-)Echo Chamber Participation: Examing Contributor Activity Beyond the Chamber

EasyChair Preprint 122

Abstract

The existence of echo chambers as a phenomenon in social media has been widely debated in recent years. Previous research has attempted to alternatively support or refute the claim that online users strongly favour interacting online with people of similar views. Much of this research has been on social networking sites such as Twitter where users directly connect with each other. A common difficulty faced by researchers of those platforms is how to define, and therefore identify, echo chambers. This research examines a different form of social media, the social news website Reddit, where users interact with each other indirectly as part of topic-based communities. These discrete communities can choose to explicitly define how community members should behave. In this paper we examine two communities : r/The_Donald, which demands echo chamber behaviour, and r/changemyview which actively discourages it. By taking communities which self-categorise their (anti-)echo chamber-ness we are able to determine whether users who choose to participate in an echo chamber or an anti-echo chamber show different levels of participation in other communities. Ultimately, our preliminary research suggests participants of the echo chamber, r/The_Donald are no less active across other communities than the average reddit user. However, we find evidence that participants of the anti-echo chamber r/changemyview are more active than the average platform user.

Keyphrases: echo chamber, social media, social news

@booklet{EasyChair:122,
  author    = {Ella Guest},
  title     = {(Anti-)Echo Chamber Participation: Examing Contributor Activity Beyond the Chamber},
  doi       = {10.29007/v1md},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 122},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2018}}