Although the ECC dislikes the phrase ‘metropolitan elite’, it is now unfortunately the colloquial term to describe a group. And this group is the one that we aim to help with our newsletters. As a result, it’s important for us to get to know them. Who are they? What do they believe? What sources drive these beliefs? We’ve had a survey on our website for nearly a year, where our subscribers have told us about their reading habits and ideas. In our investigation we discovered some interesting trends among this group such as:

• They tend to lean towards the center left, with varying stances on social and political issues.
• The majority of news info they consume occurs on digital platforms like news websites and social media sites.
• The news sources they end up relying on tend to carry progressive positions, with little difference in opinion.

Our survey was conducted over 9 months. In total, 147 out of our 2.5k subscribers responded. We want to better understand our readers so we can challenge their viewpoints. Our findings allow us to do a more precise job in monitoring and combatting echo chambers across social media and news websites. This gives us a much better look into what this group thinks, breathes and feels.

For starters, this data establishes our readers as a group that has become pretty reliant on easily accessible digital media. Data gathered on offline but established news sources such as print, television and radio found that 50%, 48% and 47% of respondents respectively use these mediums. When compared to the 83% who use news websites directly, these findings support our idea that digital media is the most important news source for our subscribers.

The power of social media in the news space is clear here. 57% use Facebook and 55% use Twitter for news updates. We also get a pretty good idea of what forms of digital media are out of favour, with mobile apps (22%), RSS feeds (12%) and Reddit (6%) coming in dead last.

What does this reveal about our readership?

• They rely on digital media, but are not quite savvy enough to manage a healthy ideological balance in the news they receive.
• As a result they are prone to digital echo chambers.
• Direct use of news websites does not do much to combat this problem, as what makes it on the front page of news sites is driven by data gathered on social media traffic. Editors use this data in hopes of allowing the stories to spread across the web quickly and attract the greatest possible number of readers.
• The echo chambers that our subscribers get trapped in perpetuate on news websites and social media spaces.

News and Social Media Monitoring

The Fundamentals:

Having found your way to the Echo Chamber Club, it seems safe to assume that you have some idea of what an echo chamber is and why they can be problematic; but probably don’t have an idea of quite the kind of work goes into pushing back against them. Before beginning my work for the ECC I was in the same boat, I had plenty of thoughts about echo chambers as a concept but no understanding of how someone would go about tracking such a thing.

If you need help defining what an echo chamber is I would suggest reading over our FAQ section, but in rough terms, an echo chamber is a space where viewpoints that differ from the norm have little to no chance of making it in.

As an outsider looking in I had no clue how the ECC went about accomplishing its mission. It was only after my introduction to some very interesting research techniques and tools that I finally began to understand how the ECC decides which topic might make for a relevant newsletter. Alice asked me to share my journey with our subscribers, so you could have an insight into how our editorial research works, and also to see if you could think of some easy improvements we might be able to make.

Once we understand this we focus on the specifics. Namely, finding out which news sites is it that our subscribers go to? We found that the Guardian followed by the BBC carries the most influence in this group.

A Look into Discovery:

Finally, we wanted to ensure that our basic assumptions about our subscribers political leanings were correct. We asked about their attitude towards Brexit, and also about their attitude towards cultural appropriation. We received an unsurprising response to the Brexit question, our subscribers disagreed with leaving the EU deeply. In contrast, we were challenged on the cultural appropriation question which our subscribers responded towards ambivalently. This shows us that more extreme leftist opinions are not mainstream in this group, the fact is they are more centrist than we initially expected.

Discovering that digital media is the preferred news source of the metropolitan elite carried a lot of weight for us, primarily by teaching us how different types of digital media cooperate. Social media and news websites are designed to show the reader what they want to see, as they want to boost web traffic and advertising profits. Therefore, what’s trending on social media directly impacts what appears on the front page of certain news websites. This discovery gave us a clear picture of how echo chambers can perpetuate across digital media.

Describing our methodology:

So, we now have a greater insight into how our subscribers access information. In order to properly challenge dominant narratives we need to understand the information these sites give us on a daily basis. As a result, we monitor social media and news headlines every day.

Let’s start by talking about social media monitoring. Monitoring narratives across social media requires carefully creating Twitter lists and pushing them through an application called Nuzzel, which tells us which articles are most popular among metropolitans. Creating Twitter lists capable of doing this requires that we carefully select a sample size of journalists, public intellectuals and otherwise influential figures. Deciding exactly which individuals make the list is a process informed by our previously mentioned survey, as well as a consideration of which voices carry the greatest weight in this community.

Monitoring news websites is exactly what you’d expect. We grab a screenshot of the front pages of influential sites, and double check the articles on them so we understand the point of view they put across. Recording daily notes during this process allows us to clearly see how broader narratives form over time.

While manual, this research is really the only way to get an understanding of how certain stories are pushed to the top of social media feeds, and consequently to the front page of major news sites. Compiling this data is what allows us to gauge exactly which viewpoints are trending in metropolitan echo chambers, and may well benefit from a newsletter.

This work is very important to the Echo Chamber Club as we want to ensure that the newsletters we curate for our audience is not pushing our own individual agendas, but is instead informed by a large body of research. Although it is impossible to always avoid personal bias, we put a lot of effort into remaining as objective as we can.