论文标题
从钱伯斯到Echo Chambers:使用第二个邻居方法量化极化,适用于Twitter的气候讨论
From chambers to echo chambers: Quantifying polarization with a second-neighbor approach applied to Twitter's climate discussion
论文作者
论文摘要
社交媒体平台通常会培养用户主要与与现有信念保持一致的内容的环境,从而加强了他们的观点并限制了对相反观点的暴露。在本文中,我们使用一种以钱伯斯为中心的无监督方法来分析X(以前是Twitter)关于气候变化的讨论 - 一阶信息源(一阶信息源) - 以大规模揭示意识形态模式。除了直接连接之外,钱伯斯还捕获了共享的影响源,从而有效有效地揭示了极化动态。分析转发模式,我们确定了气候信徒和怀疑论者的回声室,揭示了意识形态群体内的强室重叠,并且它们之间的重叠最小,从而产生了强大的双峰结构,表征了极化。我们的方法使我们能够根据受众的室内对齐方式推断出高影响力的用户的立场,从而可以将超过一半的转推人群以最少的跨组互动进行分类,这是我们所说的增强回声室分类的情况。我们对手动标签和最先进的潜在意识形态模型进行基准测试方法,发现了可比的性能,但覆盖范围近四倍。此外,我们发现回声室结构随着时间的流逝而保持稳定,即使他们的成员发生了很大变化,这表明这些结构是系统的持久性和新兴属性。值得注意的是,在2019年9月的#FridaySforfuture罢工期间,极化降低,气候怀疑率上升。这项基于室内的分析为意识形态极化在社交媒体上的持久性和流动性提供了宝贵的见解。
Social media platforms often foster environments where users primarily engage with content that aligns with their existing beliefs, thereby reinforcing their views and limiting exposure to opposing viewpoints. In this paper, we analyze X (formerly Twitter) discussions on climate change throughout 2019, using an unsupervised method centered on chambers--second-order information sources--to uncover ideological patterns at scale. Beyond direct connections, chambers capture shared sources of influence, revealing polarization dynamics efficiently and effectively. Analyzing retweet patterns, we identify echo chambers of climate believers and skeptics, revealing strong chamber overlap within ideological groups and minimal overlap between them, resulting in a robust bimodal structure that characterizes polarization. Our method enables us to infer the stance of high-impact users based on their audience's chamber alignment, allowing for the classification of over half the retweeting population with minimal cross-group interaction, in what we term augmented echo chamber classification. We benchmark our approach against manual labeling and a state-of-the-art latent ideology model, finding comparable performance but with nearly four times greater coverage. Moreover, we find that echo chamber structures remain stable over time, even as their members change significantly, suggesting that these structures are a persistent and emergent property of the system. Notably, polarization decreases and climate skepticism rises during the #FridaysForFuture strikes in September 2019. This chamber-based analysis offers valuable insights into the persistence and fluidity of ideological polarization on social media.