Breaking the Echo Chamber: Social Media Networks and Political Conflict

Breaking the Echo Chamber: Social Media Networks and Political Conflict

This article exploits data from a political conflict between language groups to show how political events can rapidly redefine how these groups interact on social media. Leveraging on a unique dataset of 26 million retweets by 120 000 Catalan- and Spanish-speaking Twitter users, we estimate individual exposure to tweets with a network-based model. We then compare two shocks in the same region and year: the Barcelona terror attack and the Catalan independence referendum of 2017. The referendum, and related police violence, triggered a sharp, symmetric jump in retweeting across language groups. The terror attack, by contrast, did not lead to a similar realignment.

The latest working paper can be accessed here. The CEPR discussion paper can be accessed here. 

We make three main contributions in this project. The first is conceptual: the distinction in what people observe and what they react to is crucial when analyzing social media data. In our model social networks interact with the sharing of content to generate what we call "exposure". Exposed individuals choose how to react to content - in our application we call this "retweet rate". This means that reactions can increase because retweet rates increase or because exposure increases (obviously the two are related but in complex ways). Second: we implement a way to meausre who is connected. Our meausre is prone to the critizism of endogeneity but it allows us to track very dynamic developments in a consistent framework. Third: the findings of the paper are surprising - in a period which was generally regarded as polarizing we find opening social networks across language groups.