Who is responsible for Twitter’s echo chamber problem? Evidence from 2016 U.S. election networks

ABSTRACT

This study examined the echo chamber phenomenon and opinion leadership on Twitter based on the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Network analysis and ‘big data’ analytics were employed to analyze more than 50 million tweets about the two presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, during the election cycle. Overall, the results suggested that Twitter communities discussing Trump and Clinton differed significantly in the level of political homogeneity and opinion leadership, and that certain opinion leaders were responsible of creating homogeneous communities on Twitter. This study made a theoretical contribution to the literature by linking opinion leadership and Twitter’s network structure and shedding light on what may have caused the echo chamber problem to happen in an emerging media landscape.

KEYWORDS:

• Twitter
• presidential election
• opinion leader
• political homophily
• network analysis
• big data

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank Chris Vargo for providing the Twitter dataset (Dataset II) for this analysis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Lei Guo (Ph.D., The University of Texas at Austin) is an assistant professor of emerging media studies at Boston University. She is also an affiliated faculty member at Boston University’s Department of Computer Science, and a junior faculty fellow at the Hariri institute. Her research focuses on the development of media effects theories, computational social science methodologies, and emerging media and democracy in the United States and China. Dr. Guo’s research has been published in a number of leading peer-reviewed journals such as Journal of Communication, Communication Research, and New Media & Society. Her co-edited book The Power of Information Networks: New Directions for Agenda Setting (2015) introduces a new theoretical perspective to understand media effects in this emerging media landscape [email: [email protected]].

Jacob A. Rohde earned his M.A. degree from the Division of Emerging Media Studies, Boston University, in 2016. He is currently a Ph.D. student at the School of Media and Journalism, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill [email: [email protected]].

H. Denis Wu (Ph.D., The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is a professor of mass communication at Boston University. His research focuses on international communication and political communication. He has won numerous research prizes, grants, and published widely in respected journals, including Journal of Communication and Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. Additionally, he has co-authored three books – Media, Politics, and Asian Americans (2009), The Media are Ill: The Symptoms and Solutions of Taiwanese News Environment (2013), and Image and Emotion in Voter Decisions: The Affect Agenda (2015). Dr. Wu was the head of the Mass Communication and Society division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC). Currently, he sits on the editorial boards of Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly; Journalism and Communication Monographs; and Journal of Political Marketing [email: [email protected]].