Of Echo Chambers and Contrarian Clubs: Exposure to Political Disagreement Among German and Italian Users of Twitter
Of Echo Chambers and Contrarian Clubs: Exposure to Political Disagreement Among German and Italian Users of Twitter
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DOI：
10.1177/2056305116664221
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发表时间：
2016-07-01
影响因子：
5.2
通讯作者：
Tucker, Joshua A.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Vaccari, Cristian;Valeriani, Augusto;Tucker, Joshua A.
学者们一直在争论，社交媒体平台允许用户选择他们接触到的信息，是否会导致人们孤立于他们不同意的观点，从而充当政治“回音室”。我们调查了有关推特用户在何种情况下会接触到(A)支持、(B)反对和(C)混合政治网络的假设。根据对意大利和德国的代表性样本进行的在线调查，这些人至少在2013年的选举中发布了一条Twitter消息，我们发现，在社交媒体促进接触相似和不同政治观点的程度上存在很大差异。我们的结果表明，在社交媒体上接触支持、反对或混合的政治网络可以通过更广泛的政治对话模式(即线下网络的结构)和政治使用社交媒体的特定习惯(即政治讨论的强度)来解释。这些发现表明，即使意识形态的同质性是模式结果，社交媒体上的分歧仍然存在，学者们在评估社交媒体对政治沟通的影响时，应该更多地关注特定的情景和性格因素。
Scholars have debated whether social media platforms, by allowing users to select the information to which they are exposed, may lead people to isolate themselves from viewpoints with which they disagree, thereby serving as political "echo chambers." We investigate hypotheses concerning the circumstances under which Twitter users who communicate about elections would engage with (a) supportive, (b) oppositional, and (c) mixed political networks. Based on online surveys of representative samples of Italian and German individuals who posted at least one Twitter message about elections in 2013, we find substantial differences in the extent to which social media facilitates exposure to similar versus dissimilar political views. Our results suggest that exposure to supportive, oppositional, or mixed political networks on social media can be explained by broader patterns of political conversation (i.e., structure of offline networks) and specific habits in the political use of social media (i.e., the intensity of political discussion). These findings suggest that disagreement persists on social media even when ideological homophily is the modal outcome, and that scholars should pay more attention to specific situational and dispositional factors when evaluating the implications of social media for political communication.