CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 68Social Media and PoliticsMisinformation and Its ImpactsMedia Influence and Politics

The geographic embedding of online echo chambers: Evidence from the Brexit campaign

Open access
Bastos, Marco, Mercea, Dan, Baronchelli, Andrea·2018·PLOS ONE
DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0206841PMC PMC6214567
Open this paper in CoChat — free accountOpen PDF

Abstract

This study explores the geographic dependencies of echo-chamber communication on Twitter during the Brexit campaign. We review the evidence positing that online interactions lead to filter bubbles to test whether echo chambers are restricted to online patterns of interaction or are associated with physical, in-person interaction. We identify the location of users, estimate their partisan affiliation, and finally calculate the distance between sender and receiver of @-mentions and retweets. We show that polarized online echo-chambers map onto geographically situated social networks. More specifically, our results reveal that echo chambers in the Leave campaign are associated with geographic proximity and that the reverse relationship holds true for the Remain campaign. The study concludes with a discussion of primary and secondary effects arising from the interaction between existing physical ties and online interactions and argues that the collapsing of distances brought by internet technologies may foreground the role of geography within one's social network.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1371/journal.pone.0206841

Cites

4 of 4 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Research works printed but not linked: 37

  1. [3]Sunstein CR. Republic.com 2.0. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press; 2007.
  2. [4]Wojcieszak M, Mutz DC. Online Groups and Political Discourse: Do Online Discussion Spaces Facilitate Exposure to Political Disagreement? J Commun. 2009; 59(1): 40– 56. 10.1111/j.1460-2466.2008.01403.x · DOI
  3. [5]Colleoni E, Rozza A, Arvidsson A. Echo Chamber or Public Sphere? Predicting Political Orientation and Measuring Political Homophily in Twitter Using Big Data. J Commun. 2014; 64(2): 317– 32. 10.1111/jcom.12084 · DOI · Paper page
  4. [6]Dubois E, Blank G. The echo chamber is overstated: the moderating effect of political interest and diverse media. Information, Communication & Society. 2018: 1– 17. 10.1080/1369118X.2018.1428656 · DOI · Paper page
  5. [7]Fletcher R, Nielsen RK. Are News Audiences Increasingly Fragmented? A Cross-National Comparative Analysis of Cross-Platform News Audience Fragmentation and Duplication. J Commun. 2017 10.1111/jcom.12315 · DOI
  6. [8]Beam MA, Hutchens MJ, Hmielowski JD. Facebook news and (de)polarization: reinforcing spirals in the 2016 US election. Information, Communication & Society. 2018: 1– 19. 10.1080/1369118X.2018.1444783 · DOI · Paper page
  7. [9]Del Vicario M, Zollo F, Caldarelli G, Scala A, Quattrociocchi W. Mapping social dynamics on Facebook: The Brexit debate. Soc Networks. 2017; 50: 6– 16. 10.1016/j.socnet.2017.02.002. · DOI · Paper page
  8. [10]Tucker JA, Guess A, Barberá P, Vaccari C, Siegel A, Sanovich S, et al Social Media, Political Polarization, and Political Disinformation: A Review of the Scientific Literature. William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, 2018 March 2018. Report No.
  9. [11]McPherson M, Smith-Lovin L, Cook JM. Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks. Annual Review of Sociology. 2001; 27(1): 415– 44. 10.1146/annurev.soc.27.1.415 · DOI · Paper page
  10. [12]Glückler J. Economic geography and the evolution of networks. Journal of Economic Geography. 2007; 7(5): 619– 34. 10.1093/jeg/lbm023 · DOI
  11. [13]McPherson M, Smith-Lovin L. Homophily in Voluntary Organizations: Status Distance and the Composition of Face-to-Face Groups. Am Sociol Rev. 1987; 52(3): 370– 9. 10.2307/2095356 · DOI
  12. [15]Hampton KN, Livio O, Goulet L. The social life of wireless urban spaces: internet use, social networks, and the public realm. J Commun. 2010; 60(4): 701– 22.
  13. [16]Hampton KN, Gupta N. Community and social interaction in the wireless city: wi-fi use in public and semi-public spaces. New Media & Society. 2008; 10(6): 831– 50. 10.1177/1461444808096247 · DOI
  14. [17]Kriesi H, Frey T. The United Kingdom: moving parties in a stable configuration In: Grande E, Kriesi H, Dolezal M, Lachat R, Bornschier S, Frey T, editors. West European Politics in the Age of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2008 p. 183– 207.
  15. [18]Curtice J. A Question of Culture or Economics? Public Attitudes to the European Union in Britain. The Political Quarterly. 2016; 87(2): 209– 18. 10.1111/1467-923X.12250 · DOI
  16. [20]Bessi A, Petroni F, Vicario MD, Zollo F, Anagnostopoulos A, Scala A, et al. Viral Misinformation: The Role of Homophily and Polarization. Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web; Florence, Italy. 2745939: ACM; 2015. p. 355–6.
  17. [22]Messing S, Westwood SJ. Selective Exposure in the Age of Social Media. Communication Research. 2014; 41(8): 1042– 63. 10.1177/0093650212466406 · DOI · Paper page
  18. [23]Wojcieszak M. ‘ Don’t talk to me’: effects of ideologically homogeneous online groups and politically dissimilar offline ties on extremism. New Media & Society. 2010; 12(4): 637– 55. 10.1177/1461444809342775 · DOI
  19. [24]Bright J. The social news gap: how news reading and news sharing diverge. J Commun. 2016; 66(3): 343– 65.
  20. [25]Pariser E. The filter bubble: what the internet is hiding from you London: Penguin; 2012.
  21. [26]Gentzkow M, Shapiro JM. Ideological Segregation Online and Offline. The Quarterly Journal of Economics. 2011; 126(4): 1799– 839.
  22. [28]Boxell L, Gentzkow M, Shapiro JM. Greater Internet use is not associated with faster growth in political polarization among US demographic groups. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2017; 114(40): 10612– 7. 10.1073/pnas.1706588114 28928150 PMC5635884 · DOI · Paper page
  23. [29]Kim Y. The contribution of social network sites to exposure to political difference: The relationships among SNSs, online political messaging, and exposure to cross-cutting perspectives. Computers in Human Behavior. 2011; 27(2): 971– 7. 10.1016/j.chb.2010.12.001. · DOI
  24. [30]Bakshy E, Messing S, Adamic L. Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook. Science. 2015; 348(6239): 1130– 2. 10.1126/science.aaa1160 25953820 · DOI · Paper page
  25. [31]Hampton KN, Sessions LF, Her EJ. Core networks, social isolation and new media Information, Communication & Society. 2011; 14(1): 130– 55. 10.1080/1369118X.2010.513417 · DOI
  26. [32]Barberá P, Jost JT, Nagler J, Tucker JA, Bonneau R. Tweeting From Left to Right: Is online political communication more than an echo chamber? Psychological Science. 2015; 26(10): 1531– 42. 10.1177/0956797615594620 26297377 · DOI · Paper page
  27. [33]Vaccari C, Valeriani A, Barberá P, Jost JT, Nagler J, Tucker JA. Of Echo Chambers and Contrarian Clubs: Exposure to Political Disagreement Among German and Italian Users of Twitter. Social Media + Society. 2016; 2(3): 2056305116664221 10.1177/2056305116664221 · DOI · Paper page
  28. [35]Himelboim I, McCreery S, Smith M. Birds of a Feather Tweet Together: Integrating Network and Content Analyses to Examine Cross-Ideology Exposure on Twitter. J Comput-Mediat Comm. 2013; 18(2): 40– 60. 10.1111/jcc4.12001 · DOI
  29. [36]Benkler Y, Faris R, Roberts H, Zuckerman E. Breitbart-led right-wing media ecosystem altered broader media agenda. Columbia Journalism Review. 2017 3 March 2017.
  30. [39]Takhteyev Y, Gruzd A, Wellman B. Geography of Twitter networks. Soc Networks. 2012; 34(1): 73– 81. 10.1016/j.socnet.2011.05.006. · DOI
  31. [40]Bastos MT, Mercea D. The Brexit Botnet and User-Generated Hyperpartisan News. Social Science Computer Review. 2017 10.1177/0894439316654611 · DOI
  32. [41]Sloan L. Who Tweets in the United Kingdom? Profiling the Twitter Population Using the British Social Attitudes Survey 2015. Social Media + Society. 2017; 3(1): 2056305117698981 10.1177/2056305117698981 · DOI
  33. [42]Sloan L, Morgan J, Housley W, Williams M, Edwards A, Burnap P, et al Knowing the Tweeters: Deriving Sociologically Relevant Demographics from Twitter. Sociological Research Online. 2013; 18(3): 7.
  34. [44]Halberstam Y, Knight B. Homophily, group size, and the diffusion of political information in social networks: Evidence from Twitter. Journal of Public Economics. 2016; 143: 73– 88. 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2016.08.011. · DOI
  35. [45]Barberá P, Rivero G. Understanding the Political Representativeness of Twitter Users. Social Science Computer Review. 2015; 33(6): 712– 29. 10.1177/0894439314558836 · DOI
  36. [47]Becker SO, Fetzer T, Novy D. Who voted for Brexit? A comprehensive district-level analysis. Economic Policy. 2017; 32(92): 601– 50.
  37. [48]Rainie H, Wellman B. Networked: the new social operating system. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; 2012.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Bastos, M., Mercea, D., & Baronchelli, A.
Affiliations
University of London (GB)
Corresponding author
Bastos, Marco
ORCID
Venue
PLOS ONE
Publisher
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Published
2018-11-02
Volume
13
Issue
11
Pages
e0206841
ISSN
1932-6203 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.1371/journal.pone.0206841
PMC
PMC6214567
OpenAlex
W2899324216
Cited by
68
References
4
Citations by year
2026: 4 · 2025: 12 · 2024: 8 · 2023: 11 · 2022: 5 · 2021: 11 · 2020: 11 · 2019: 6
FWCI
15.30
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
  • PLoS ONE (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • SSRN Electronic Journal (acceptedVersion)
  • Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • City Research Online (City University London) (acceptedVersion)
  • RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
  • DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
Funders
School of Arts and Social Sciences of City, University of London (Research Pump-Priming Fund #90608SS)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Communication › Social Media and Politics
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Media Influence and Politics
Keywords
echo chambers, filter bubbles, Twitter, geographic proximity, online polarization, retweets and mentions, partisan affiliation
MeSH terms
Communication, European Union, United Kingdom, Humans, Politics, Social Support, Internet, Social Networking, Social Media

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review