Content-Based Echo Chamber Detection on Social Media Platforms

Abstract

“Echo chamber” is a metaphorical description of a situation in which beliefs are amplified inside a closed network, and social media platforms provide an environment that is well-suited to this phenomenon. Depending on the scale of the echo chamber, a user's judgment of different opinions may be restricted. The current study focuses on detecting echoing interaction between a post and its related comments to then quantify the predominating degree of echo chamber behavior on Facebook pages. To enable such detection, two content-based features are designed; the first aids stance representation of comments on a particular discussion topic, and the second focuses on the type and intensity of emotion elicited by a subject. This work also introduces data-driven semi-supervised approaches to extract such features from social media data.