
Is Online Political Communication More Than an Echo Chamber? - pulisse
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797615594620
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pulisse
Abstract: _We estimated ideological preferences of 3.8 million Twitter users
and, using a data set of nearly 150 million tweets concerning 12 political and
nonpolitical issues, explored whether online communication resembles an “echo
chamber” (as a result of selective exposure and ideological segregation) or a
“national conversation.” We observed that information was exchanged primarily
among individuals with similar ideological preferences in the case of
political issues (e.g., 2012 presidential election, 2013 government shutdown)
but not many other current events (e.g., 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, 2014
Super Bowl). Discussion of the Newtown shootings in 2012 reflected a dynamic
process, beginning as a national conversation before transforming into a
polarized exchange. With respect to both political and nonpolitical issues,
liberals were more likely than conservatives to engage in cross-ideological
dissemination; this is an important asymmetry with respect to the structure of
communication that is consistent with psychological theory and research
bearing on ideological differences in epistemic, existential, and relational
motivation. Overall, we conclude that previous work may have overestimated the
degree of ideological segregation in social-media usage._

