Cascades Across Networks Are Sufficient for the Formation of Echo Chambers: An Agent-Based Model

Abstract

Investigating how echo chambers emerge in social networks is increasingly crucial, given their role in facilitating the retention of misinformation, inducing intolerance towards opposing views, and misleading public and political discourse. Previously, the emergence of echo chambers has been attributed to psychological biases and inter-individual di erences, requiring repeated interactions among network-users and rewiring or pruning of social ties. Using an idealised population of social network users, the present results suggest that when combined with positive credibility perceptions of a communicating source, social media users' ability to rapidly share information with each other through a single cascade can be su icient to produce echo chambers. Crucially, we show that this requires neither special psychological explanation (e.g., bias or individual di erences), nor repeated interactions-though these may be exacerbating factors. In fact, this e ect is made increasingly worse the more generations of peer-to-peer transmissions it takes for information to permeate a network. This raises important questions for social network architects, if truly opposed to the increasing prevalence of deleterious societal trends that stem from echo chamber formation.

Simulating the influence of Facebook fan pages on individual attitudes toward vaccination using agent‐based modelling

“…This has been demonstrated through a model that shows how echo chambers can be made stronger through social, societal, and technological means (Geschke et al, 2019). However, one recently developed model suggests that a simple sharing mechanism based on credibility among other users is enough to produce an echo chamber phenomenon without the need of special conditions (Fränken & Pilditch, 2021). Nevertheless, the evidence of the platform's influence in influencing one's opinion cannot be ignored.…”

Psychological inoculation can reduce susceptibility to misinformation in large rational agent networks

“…To test how psychological inoculations may impact these complex and dynamic information systems, we integrate inoculation theory within an ABM. Previous work has used ABMs to explore belief diffusion [ 53 ], cascading effects [ 19 ], echo-chamber formation [ 17 , 51 ], micro-targeting [ 54 , 55 ], how climate change scepticism can spread in social networks [ 56 ] and emergent polarization [ 57 ].…”

“…However, while the principle of cognitive inoculation has been shown to be effective at conferring psychological resistance against misinformation at the individual level, for example in the context of COVID-19 [13], political disinformation [14] and climate change [15], a crucial open question with significant theoretical and applied importance is to what extent 'psychological herd immunity' against misinformation is feasible [13,16]. To address this challenge, we integrate inoculation theory within an agent-based model (ABM) to explore the effects of applying psychological inoculation on the spread of misinformation, belief polarization and the formation of echo chambers [17][18][19]. ABMs allow for implementation of cognitive, social and structural elements related to the spread of misinformation and enable researchers to test the effectiveness of the inoculation model on a societal scale.…”

Determinants of escape from echo chambers: The predictive power of political orientation, social media use, and demographics

“…Some studies were concerned with the factors contributing to the formation of echo chambers and the reasons why people fall into them. Some micro-factors have been found to be influential, such as automatic systems, that is, recommender algorithms used on the Internet platforms (Dandekar, Goel, and Lee, 2013), confirmation bias, that is, the tendency to seek information confirming one's prior beliefs (Franken and Pilditch, 2021;Mynatt, Doherty, and Tweney, 1978;Nickerson, 1998), cognitive dissonance, that is, the pressure to reduce distress caused by different views (Barkun, 2013;Festinger, 1957;Sear and Freeman, 1971), and homophily, that is, people of similar values, attitudes, beliefs, and status flock together (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Cook, 2001;Zafarani, Abbasi, and Liu, 2014). Some macro-factors have also been found to have impact on the formation of echo chambers.…”