A Sociolinguistic Study of Online Echo Chambers on Twitter

Nikita Duseja, Harsh Jhamtani


Abstract
Online social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are increasingly facing criticism for polarization of users. One particular aspect which has caught the attention of various critics is presence of users in echo chambers - a situation wherein users are exposed mostly to the opinions which are in sync with their own views. In this paper, we perform a sociolinguistic study by comparing the tweets of users in echo chambers with the tweets of users not in echo chambers with similar levels of polarity on a broad topic. Specifically, we carry out a comparative analysis of tweet structure, lexical choices, and focus issues, and provide possible explanations for the results.
Anthology ID:
W19-2109
Volume:
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Svitlana Volkova, David Jurgens, Dirk Hovy, David Bamman, Oren Tsur
Venue:
NLP+CSS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
78–83
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-2109
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W19-2109
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nikita Duseja and Harsh Jhamtani. 2019. A Sociolinguistic Study of Online Echo Chambers on Twitter. In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science, pages 78–83, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Sociolinguistic Study of Online Echo Chambers on Twitter (Duseja & Jhamtani, NLP+CSS 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/W19-2109.pdf