Instead, it seems to bring forth the worst of human instincts: we cluster together into tribes that comfort us with reaffirmation and protect us from disagreement “echo chambers” that reinforce existing perspective and foster confirmation biases.
Disintermediation has changed the way we as a society form narratives about our common world with promises of more egalitarian ways of meeting and discussing.īut despite early optimism about this ostensibly decentralized and democratic meeting-place, the online world seems less and less like a common “table” that “gathers us together” (p.52) to freely discuss and identify societal problems in a new type of “public sphere”. Today’s media is less organized through centralized decision-making, and more through complex cascade processes, where news items spread like wild-fire over social networks through direct connections between news producers and consumers-categories between which it is becoming increasingly hard to distinguish. The way we become informed, debate, and form our opinions have changed profoundly with the advent of online media. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The author has declared that no competing interests exist. Fileset.įunding: This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme project ODYCCEUS (grant agreement n° 732942). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: Data for empirical simulations are available from: Törnberg, Petter (2018): Empirical simulation graphs.
Received: MaAccepted: AugPublished: September 20, 2018Ĭopyright: © 2018 Petter Törnberg.
These findings have implication for the study of the media logic of new social media.Ĭitation: Törnberg P (2018) Echo chambers and viral misinformation: Modeling fake news as complex contagion. The echo chambers effect likely comes from that they form the initial bandwagon for diffusion. It finds an “echo chamber effect”: the presence of an opinion and network polarized cluster of nodes in a network contributes to the diffusion of complex contagions, and there is a synergetic effect between opinion and network polarization on the virality of misinformation. This paper uses a network simulation model to study a possible relationship between echo chambers and the viral spread of misinformation. This spread have been suggested to be related to the similarly problematized phenomenon of “echo chambers”, but the causal nature of this relationship has proven difficult to disentangle due to the connected nature of social media, whose causality is characterized by complexity, non-linearity and emergence. The viral spread of digital misinformation has become so severe that the World Economic Forum considers it among the main threats to human society.
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