Blog – The Echo Chamber Club

Are we more polarised than ever before?

Alice Thwaite — Thu, 07 Mar 2019 09:52:51 +0000

This article originally appeared in Drugstore Culture in October 2018

“We are a nation divided.” This assertion about the condition of British politics is now stated with such conviction few dare challenge it. But should they? This week, the digital think-tank WebRoots Democracy invited the neuroscientist, Kris De Meyer, the machine learning specialist, Rula Awad and me to Newspeak House in east London to discuss whether we are more polarised than ever before.

From the outset, I’ll confess I’ve got very strong opinions on the subject. This is because I truly value diversity of opinions and lifestyles in any one community, and I’ve gone on a long and personal journey to understand the concept of ‘echo chambers’ and how our information environment is changing.

In the first half of this decade the core concept was often advanced but not broadly accepted. To generalise from the academic literature on the subject: the essential argument is that echo chambers limit an individual’s access to different kinds of information.

This constrained access leads, in turn, to polarisation, and polarisation is bad for democracy. Cass Sunstein, the first to coin the phrase, worried about whether individuals would be able to function as citizens if all they received was highly-personalised news. Our bespoke information environments would be so different that there would be no shared public space in which we could all come together and seek democratically-negotiated solutions to society’s most pressing problems.

In 2011, Eli Pariser took a different view. His concern was for our individual liberty and freedom of thought. If search engines and social algorithms could generate vastly different answers to the same question when asked by people with dissimilar algorithmic profiles, then how could we know that the decisions we made as a consequences were objective?

Although both wrote best-selling books, it took the earth-shaking election of Donald Trump and the Brexit referendum in 2016 for the concept of echo chambers to be catapulted into the mainstream. These events were not just shocking to the pundits who failed to predict them, but also, in many cases, for the politicians who had actually campaigned for the (unexpectedly) victorious side.

As the political and media class clutched at straws, many instant theories were put forward to explain the unanticipated results. The prevalence of echo chambers provided an obvious conceptual fit. It was thought that Trump’s supporters and Brexit voters had lurked in such a powerful and persuasive digital silos that they couldn’t have voted rationally. The implication was: if only they had listened to the other side, then things would have been different.

My experience working in polarisation and echo chambers

I took a slightly different tack. I learned a long time ago – and continue to learn – that you can rarely change other people, but that you can change yourself. So, whilst I was fielding phone calls from technologists, activists and journalists who sought to understand how they could break the seal of other people’s filter bubbles, I instead tried to puncture my own. How could I discover and understand the views of other people who inhabited completely different social settings, with completely different beliefs and experiences?

Thus the Echo Chamber Club was born, and I began actively to seek out views that I wouldn’t ordinarily environment in my immediate work and friendship group. I looked for perspectives in favour of Brexit, against immigration, and in favour of Putin. I challenged my own views on the economy, on democracy and international relations. I learned how you could be pro-life and a feminist, I began to support safe spaces, and I realised that homogeneity was not restricted to political groups: the assumption, for instance, that Hulu’s production The Handmaid’s Tale was somehow a parable of Trump’s America – chronological nonsense, since the series was commissioned long before his election – had become an unchallenged orthodoxy across mainstream platforms.

In many cases this work was emotionally very difficult. But it could also be incredibly illuminating. I learned I had to read difficult books and articles up to three times before I actually engaged with what the writer was saying. My first interpretation would often be polluted by my pre-existing suppositions. I had to grapple with strange words and new contexts. And I had to dig deep into my own belief system to understand why other groups felt so frustrated with my worldview. I realised that simply reading one article about someone else’s viewpoint is nothing like enough if you are seeking something approaching intellectual empathy. You have to speak their language, walk in their shoes, and become versed in a completely new system of beliefs truly to appraise it.

Today, the conversation has shifted from this initial emphasis upon echo chambers. But there is still huge concern about polarisation and a general presumption that it is mutilating our democracy.

It’s important to note that polarisation, at least in academic circles, does not refer to how we disagree with each other. It does not refer to whether we scream at the other side, or manage, somehow, to coexist peacefully. Instead, it just measures the extent of the disagreement. In the first image we see a community where there is an established consensus on a particular issue, or set of issues. In the second we see polarisation.

The event

Kris De Meyer is a neuroscientist who specialises in how we make decisions, and how these decisions lead to polarisation. “Our psychology hasn’t changed in the past two, nor 20, nor even the past thousand years” he argues. One of psychology’s most arresting findings is that our actions can change our beliefs – rather than, as one might automatically suppose, the other way round.

Imagine a voter who was undecided two months before the 2016 Brexit referendum, and – after weighing up the pros and cons – tentatively chose to vote Remain. Vacillating up until polling day, she would subsequently convince herself with growing confidence that her choice had been right. We tend to justify our past decisions retroactively and consequently become more entrenched in a position that may often have been initially reached with considerable uncertainty. De Meyer argues that the tendency in many democratic contests to offer binary options – In or Out, this party or that one – is a recipe for polarisation since it forces people to make clear-cut decisions which they later feel ever-more determined to justify.

He notes that conforming to the mores of our community is a natural consequence of the way in which our brains work. Children as young as three months old often show signs of favouring those that share their preferences and are helpful to them. We enjoy being around people who hold similar opinions, even if – as is the case with many liberals – those opinions have their foundational assumption in the belief that we are independent as individuals.

Strikingly, Rula Awad, a machine learning expert who has studied division extensively, says that “there is little evidence to show we are becoming more polarised”. She contends that although there has been a slight increase in political division in recent years, this pattern seems to show a fairly cyclical swing away from an old consensus – which pretty much in line with historical precedent. Even more intriguingly, Awad argues that “the evidence shows that the internet and social media exposes us to more varied perspectives than we would have encountered in a pre-digital age” [my italics].

Let’s get back to first principles: why are we so upset about polarisation at all? It’s because we assume it will destabilise the democratic process and threaten civic cohesion. A government legislates in the interests of a specific group or group; there will correspondingly be a significant number of people who are opposed to that action. These people may soon feel disenfranchised and might even be tempted to take violent action. Ergo: all the sinews of the body politic must be stretched to prevent polarisation.

This is not my view. If polarisation – defined as significant disagreement – is so deeply threatening, in and of itself, then the supposedly higher cause of achieving a workable consensus should logically oblige one side to concede to the other. But neither side, of course, would be willing to do that. And why should they?

The philosophical flaw in the argument is the supreme value assigned to consensus and unity. But why should we think this way? I value innovative and fresh ideas, the challenge of new convictions and propositions. In any society, however consensual, there are always people who, for whatever reason, oppose the status quo. I don’t believe that because these minorities are too small to pose a substantial threat to stability, that they should be ignored.

We should care about our emotive feeling towards the other side, not polarisation per se

My point is that we are looking in the wrong place. The problem is not polarisation per se; it is our animosity towards the other side, which is not the same thing at all. The Pew Centre has shown that US Democrats are increasingly fearful of, angry with and frustrated by Republicans. The same is true of Republicans’ feelings towards Democrats. These are strong and potentially violent emotions, visible right now in the highly contentious campaigns for the mid-term elections on November 6.

If polarisation refers only to the extent of disagreement, my question is this: can we not confront that division – welcome it even, as a source of intellectual evolution – but find ways of controlling the aggressive feelings that often accompany it? How do we nurture a civic and social environment in which we feel psychologically safe, and yet can still voice seriously divergent opinions?

In the recent past, political rhetoric has tended to privilege the quest for convergence. In the 1997 Labour manifesto Tony Blair declared: “I want a Britain that is one nation, with shared values and purpose”. His guru, Anthony Giddens, wrote in 1994 that we need “a public arena in which controversial issues… can be resolved, or at least handled, through dialogue”. Nothing wrong with dialogue, of course. But the highest value was always assigned to consensus – as if it were intrinsically irrational to take issue with the ideas holding together the canvas of New Labour’s ‘Big Tent’.

This approach has not worked. It’s all very well to encourage consensus in small groups – in situations where the shape of a good outcome is fairly manifest. A jury strives to decide whether a particular person is guilty; Parliament votes on a specific piece of legislation. Note, however, that in both of these cases a lot of pre-emptive work has been done to ensure that all participants agree on the manner in which a decision should be reached. The rules of the game are agreed. The objective is to reach an agreement – or at least a respected majority opinion – on what conclusion should be drawn from the facts and arguments under deliberation.

But – like it or not – this approach simply does not translate to the broader public sphere. You cannot expect an entire population to behave like the House of Commons or a board meeting: this is an elementary category mistake.

Instead, we need to broaden the range of forums in which different views can be freely expressed. Instead of narrowing the debate to a soft common ground, we should encourage and enable different groups to set their agendas, to talk openly about the issues that are important to them and to seek new meanings in open dialogue. We should be able to express emotion without embarrassment.

Instead of flinching from disagreement we should acknowledge it as the lifeblood of democracy. Far from fearing strong opinions, we should be helping our fellow citizens to disagree with one another in the public sphere – in a civilized way, of course – so different ideas can flourish, minorities are able to express themselves and none feel excluded from the table.

It is a fool’s errand to try to minimise or paper over division, especially in a complex society. Indeed it is positively dangerous: it is precisely when opinion is suppressed or driven to the margins that emotion surges in ways that can become very scary. The great civic task is not to end polarisation, but to make it work.

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The Crisis of Meaning

Alice Thwaite — Mon, 14 May 2018 11:07:02 +0000

The Crisis of Meaning

I’ve been running the Echo Chamber Club for nearly two years now. When I started, I wanted to help find articles and points of view that didn’t naturally land on my friends’ news feeds. We wanted to learn why you’d vote Brexit, and why you’d vote for Trump.

The first newsletter was rudimentary. It was a collection of 4 pro-Brexit articles. The concept was fairly easy to understand. However, as I started digging into new topics I found a collection of articles wasn’t the best way of communicating a new point of view. You can’t really put perspectives in a box. Different groups had different ways of explaining their world-view. They considered different facts to be important and described their experiences and opinions in dissimilar ways. From writing an article about the alt-right, it was clear that just offering collections of news articles was not going to be enough to communicate a completely different philosophy to those that abhor it. I began to include introductions in the newsletters too. These included what the agenda in the ‘metropolitan liberal and progressive press’ had been, and then touched on a different way of framing the same issue, or perhaps one that had escaped my subscribers’ news entirely.

It is only looking back on the success of the newsletter that I realise it is this interpretation that is the critical part of ‘seeing the world through the eyes of others’. Despite having the appearance of a language you understand, diving into an article with a different perspective is like jumping into advanced Arabic as an English reader. However, it has the appearance of a language you understand. This idea of a shared language is an illusion. We are experiencing a crisis of meaning. The mutual understanding of the referents of words are lost.

There are countless journalists, writers and academics who are worried about the internet’s influence on democracy. We believe in the art of deliberation, but we fear that our conversations are hijacked or gamed online. The right-wing press fear that freedom of speech is curtailed. The left-wing press worries about the rise of populism, disinformation and nefarious influence on elections. But the solutions each side poses tend to be antagonistic. We view those with existentially different world-views in our democracy as the enemy and not as people who we can progress with. We want to kill other opinions that contradict our own, we don’t welcome them with open arms. We inherently don’t trust the deliberative system. We don’t believe that the best point of view will win in a deliberative democracy.

So, we are stuck. On the one hand, we recognise that ‘echo chambers’ have a damaging effect on society. On the other hand, we don’t want to debate dangerous ideas that we believe may undermine our democratic institutions nor pose a threat to our personal wellbeing.

Does deliberation work?

How do we move forward? Like many of you I’ve spoken with, I don’t believe that a new piece of software will fix this problem. I believe there is a fundamental problem with the way that we perceive democracy. No longer should we think of democracy as an institution which offers us the power to deliberate on topics and then come to a rational consensus as to what the best policies are. This idea is damaging. All too often we see policies put in place which we don’t consider to be rational. We’re all losing faith in the system.

Instead of this Habermasian approach to democracy (by which I mean deliberative democracy), we should instead think of our democracies as being agonist in nature. This means that we accept that any ideas of rationality and objectivity are called such because of a dominant ideology. There will never be a state in which we achieve democratic consensus. Instead, different ideological groups are battling it out to become the most dominant ideology. With this approach, we can make a shift to understand that the people who have different opinions from us are adversaries and not enemies. We will not be polarised, because we do not view others as ‘evil’, but rather as the competition.

There are a number of criticisms of agonism and deliberation which I don’t have time to go into in this blog post. My point is to say that it may be the ideas around deliberation which are at the heart of the problem, which should be addressed at the same time as practical ideas around content moderation, censorship and internet design.

We’re beginning to achieve what previous generations could only dream of; an injection of completely new ideas into the demos. However, with this comes chaos. Despite many groups looking for truth, there are so many different interpretations of history and the social sciences that there can be many different value systems that hold true. We need a new idea of democracy to ensure that we can all live happily together, side-by-side.

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A Theory of Echo Chambers – January 2018

Alice Thwaite — Sun, 28 Jan 2018 15:57:26 +0000

Designing a new echo chamber theory

Before I started at the Oxford Internet Institute in September 2017, I wrote a definition of echo chambers.

“An echo chamber is a community with little variance in opinion. It is a place where there is no desire, or a means, to access a different point of view.”

I spoke at a conference and invited feedback on this definition. Did it fit with what others had in mind when they thought of what an echo chamber was? This had two responses. One was positive. This definition is platform neutral so it works for both online and offline homophily. It situates an echo chamber as a community, and not as the inherent characteristic of an individual. By mentioning ‘the means’, alongside ‘desire’, it shows that echo chambers can be solved with education and design changes to internet platforms and protocols. It also is explanatory of echo chambers in the past – either in Nazi Germany or in the Dark Ages.

The second response was interesting. A couple of people came up to me after the conference and remarked that things that I wouldn’t call echo chambers clearly were. It made me realise the nuance of the phrase. Many people have completely different understandings of what an echo chamber is.

My independent work on echo chambers at the OII is starting to take off. I have an excellent supervisor and I want to chart how my opinions are changing on the topic as I read more and discuss with my supervisor and other members of the faculty.

So here is my first post on the topic and my initial thoughts before I really get stuck in.

Echo chamber as a metaphor

The first is to note that in both the academic literature and journalistic articles, an echo chamber should be treated as a metaphor. It is not (yet) a theory. The first book on ‘echo chambers’ was a literary novel by Gabriel Josipovici written in 1980. The first mention of a non-fiction echo chamber was in 2001 in Sunstein’s Republic.com. In this book, Sunstein refers to echo chambers as a metaphor to describe citizens just reading a personalised newspaper called the ‘Daily Me’. Sunstein’s work has influenced a lot of further commentary and debate on internet ethics. However, you wouldn’t say that Sunstein has developed a succinct ‘echo chamber theory’. Instead, you’d say he uses it sporadically as a metaphor to describe different parts of his work.

The first book on ‘echo chambers’ was a literary novel by Gabriel Josipovici written in 1980.

Eli Pariser’s ‘The Filter Bubble’ details how personalised algorithms lead us to see drastically different Google results and Facebook feeds. This is true. He then theorised some unfavourable outcomes given uber-personalisation. This book had a real effect on me when I first read it. I produced two special reports for The Times on ‘Customer Loyalty’ in 2013 and in 2014. Each of these reports sung the praises of personalisation in commerce. It was the first time I woke up to what could be happening online.

About a year ago my own understanding of what echo chambers are started to deviate from the Pariser and Sunstein literature. I exchanged emails with a think-tank about the difference between a filter bubble and an echo chamber – we agreed that echo chambers are self-constructed and filter bubbles are linked to tech. This is more of a semantic difference – it feels right that this should be the line of differentiation. So in a sense it is also metaphorical. But it’s one that’s stuck through most of my thoughts and writings on the topic.

From reading many academic articles and books this year that try to ‘confirm’ or ‘debunk’ echo chambers, it’s clear individuals take slightly different interpretations of what an echo chamber is. For example, one could define echo chambers as ‘access to ANY information with a different point of view’, or ‘reading anything with a different point of view’, or ‘interacting with anything with a different point of view’. Most look at whether an individual is firmly in an echo chamber or not, and not whether you have a greater propensity to be in an echo chamber than others. You can see how these subtle differences lead to a lot of confusion. If you were being unkind, you could say that some chose which definition would suit them according to what they already thought about the topic.

Initial ideas

I haven’t yet embarked on a systematic literature review so the following should be viewed as my thoughts having spent 4 months going through the compulsory reading lists here. This is how I think an echo chamber should be theorized right now – however, I’m fully expecting my feelings to change.

The community part of an echo chamber must remain in the definition. An individual will have access to many different points of view in their on and offline communities. This could be through the different groups they are part of. To give a personal example; I have a grandfather in Yorkshire who is broadly against immigration. My grandparents in Cornwall voted for Brexit. I am a feminist, but many of my male friends (at least in June 2017) were not taking part in any of the conversations I was having with my female friends about feminism. I am part of the centre-left metropolitan elite. I occasionally go to football matches down in Portsmouth. I have friends that I speak with about politics, and I have friends who I speak with about hair products. These all fit with the idea of an echo chamber being a place with a little variance in opinion. When I go to Portsmouth I mainly talk about how great Portsmouth Football Club is – there is no variance in opinion there. You hopefully see what I’m getting at.

For some reason, it is very difficult for me to speak with a person in another echo chamber about another topic. I was struck in October 2017 about how little words I had to describe feminism to a man who was not talking about feminism. It’s jilted, it’s difficult and it’s messy. We don’t have the same experiences here. It’s very easy to go back to topics that we like to talk about. Similarly for my grandparents who support Brexit. We do ANYTHING to avoid talking about Brexit at the dinner table.

Language and echo chambers

For this reason, I think that language will have a strong part to play in an echo chamber theory. We may have access to different points of view – but although we may be speaking English, our understanding and definitions of words will be completely different. Take the word racism – there is a huge variance in opinion about what that means. The same could be said about the word ‘consent’, or ‘inequality’, or even ‘pink’. We literally speak different languages. I think I’ll have to do some work to understand whether philosophically and psychologically we can reduce linguistics to behaviour and visa versa.

This is also nice because it fits with social science theories of ‘polysemy’. It is well documented that when two people read the same tweet, or hear the same speech, we may get an entirely different meaning from the same words. What I’d like to test is whether belonging to a similar echo chamber will mean that two people get the same polysemy from phenomena.

Polarisation and echo chambers

This takes us to the idea of polarization and fragmentation. It’s very easy to think that another person is an idiot if you are speaking different languages without realizing it. I started to theorise about different levels of misunderstanding there could be.

An event occurs which is factually indisputable e.g. two planes crash into the World Trade Towers, the Golden Globes take place, the Handmaids Tale is screened on TV. The discussion then fragments – different echo chambers take different stories as primary.
An opinion piece which is meant for one echo chamber finds its way into another. The document is analysed and perhaps the meaning is misinterpreted and misunderstood by each echo chamber. E.g. the Google manifesto, the case of Justine Sacco, Kate Maltby and Damian Green.

In each of these, there are positive and negative outcomes – I’m simply trying to be descriptive with the above examples.

You’ll find that there will be a dominant conversation in each of your echo chambers. You’ll have different identities in each of them. There may be one that you consider takes a larger part of your life than another.

Homophily theory

Homophily theory dates back to the 19^th century. Homophily is defined as the tendency for individuals to align themselves with communities that look like them. This could be according to race, sexuality, gender, age, education and so on. Secondary to this is their common values. It is my idea that up until the advent of the internet, we tended to homophilise according to what we look like, whereas now we’re more likely to homophilise according to our values.

There is a lot of work to be done over the next few months. I need to become familiar with network theory, spiral of silence theory, selective exposure theory, byproduct exposure, as well as polarization and opinion formation theory. In the meantime, I wanted to put these ideas up here in case any of you had any feedback?

Please do comment below or send me your thoughts – editor@echochamber.club or @alicelthwaite.

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Update for 2018

Alice Thwaite — Mon, 15 Jan 2018 13:25:30 +0000

The Future of the Echo Chamber Club

I want to share the news of a difficult decision with you all. As many of you know, I’m currently studying for a masters at the Oxford Internet Institute.

Last term I found it difficult to spend enough time researching the newsletters. I want to make sure that every newsletter curated is of a high standard, and so this term I am going to send out newsletters with less regularity. If I get an excellent contribution, I’ll make sure that reaches you, and if there is a topic that challenges me, then I’ll curate something on that too. I’m also keen to start blogging a lot more about echo chambers in general. For example, I wrote about the difference between a ‘filter bubble’ and an ‘echo chamber’ here. Next week I’ve got a piece in Open Democracyon polarisation. I’ll shoot an email every now and again with an update. I promise these won’t spam you!

Creatively, I find that I have my best ideas when I have a bit of space. So, it may be that I find something else to help challenge us and to seek new ideas, but that fits in better with my schedule. I’ll let you know where my thinking takes me on that front. Or it might be that one of you have an amazing idea and we could work on something together.

Thank you all so much for your support and emails last year. I’ve been overwhelmed by how many of you have written to me about the project to tell me what it means to you. Please do keep those emails coming – if you have an idea for a future project, or you’d like to curate a newsletter or any comment at all! My email is here.

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Echo Chamber vs Filter Bubble

Alice Thwaite — Tue, 26 Dec 2017 12:25:57 +0000

What is the Difference Between an Echo Chamber and a Filter Bubble?

A quick one on the difference between a filter bubble and an echo chamber. Two two terms are conflated in the magazine articles and academic papers I read, as well as the conversations I have. Many believe that an echo chamber means the same thing as a filter bubble and visa versa. This is not the case.

There is a basic understanding of the definition of the two. Internet communication has meant individuals only access ideas by those with like-minded beliefs. A narrow information diet leads to increasing polarisation and misunderstanding of those who may live in the same village as us.

However, these two phrases do not mean the same thing. More and more specialists and researchers are using the phrase ‘filter bubble’ to describe only online mechanisms of information polarisation, like the algorithms you find on social media and search engines. In contrast, ‘echo chamber’ refers to both online and offline mechanisms, like algorithms plus pub culture, that act simultaneously. Echo chambers have therefore existed since the birth of humanity and communities. Filter bubbles have not.

Subscribe to the Echo Chamber Club Newsletter – a service for ‘liberal & progressive metropolitans’ to access different ideas

It is easy to understand why there is confusion. Given my early research, the term ‘echo chamber’ started in literature, not in academic theory. Although we all understand the analogy in our own way, it does not mean that the idea is robust enough to test. In contrast, ‘filter bubble’ theory has been defined by Eli Pariser in his book ‘The Filter Bubble’. Although many attribute Sunstein as the first adopter of the term ‘echo chamber’ in his book ‘Republic 2.0’ – this was also used as an analogy for many different phenomena of a personalised internet – and is not well established in the way we commonly use the words.

Further research ideas

So we don’t really know how echo chambers have changed post internet. Here are some ideas for further research. You could do a comparative study between a community with heavy reliance on the internet, and one that does not. Or, you could do what I’m looking to do, which is a philosophical analysis of how identity (both in community and individuals) has changed post-internet and compare this with political homophily theories from social psychology in the 50s.

There will be some more routes and I welcome your thoughts – editor@echochamber.club.

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Who is the Metropolitan Elite?

Sebastian Ullman — Thu, 17 Aug 2017 08:00:42 +0000

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.

Where do you get your news?

Direct from news websites 82%

Facebook 56%

Twitter 53%

Print newspapers 49%

Television 45%

Radio 43%

Word of mouth 35%

Publisher's mobile app 21%

RSS aggregator 13%

Reddit 6%

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.

Which news sources do you read more than once a week (and you mostly agree with)?

The Guardian 74%

BBC 63%

The Independent 27%

The Economist 24%

The Times 22%

Washington Post 21%

Other 19%

New Yorker 19%

The Financial Times 18%

Medium 15%

Al Jazeera 12%

Buzzfeed 11%

The New Statesman 10%

Telegraph 9%

The Spectator 8%

Wall Street Journal 8%

Daily Mail 6%

Evening Standard 4%

Breitbart 2%

Daily Express 1%

The data gathered in this question tells us exactly which publications our subscribers tend to read, and more importantly trust. This helps give us some insight into what sources direct mainstream thought in the community.

Understanding that the Guardian, which was at the top of our list at 74% and the BBC which came in relatively close second at 63%, seem to dominate influence among this community is very informative when it comes to our social media monitoring. As you can see from the example above the BBC and the Guardian often have very similar front pages (at least they did in June and July). The fact that no other publication scored above 27% allows us to truly pinpoint our monitoring. It is worth noting that there are a large amount of UK publications in the list – mainly because over 80% most of our subscribers live in the UK.

Do you agree with this statement: "I believe cultural appropriation is morally wrong"? (Ranked 1-10)

Just to be clear, cultural appropriation describes the adoption or use of components of one group’s culture by another culture. The results of this question were surprising. We thought our readers would be more than ambivalent. We thought they would be against it.

What does this imply about our subscribers?

Our readership is not an ultra left subgroup of progressives at all. They are also not particularly infatuated with social issues propped up by the left.
We assume that our subscribers don’t really fit any one progressive stereotype, rather, they are a socially and politically diverse group.

Do you agree with this statement: "I wish Britain had voted to remain in the EU"? (Ranked 1-10)

This is hardly surprising. The fact that only 5% selected a rank below 5, shows that our readership is anti-Brexit.

In fact, 43% who selected a rank of 10, indicating strong disagreement with Brexit. 89% in total agreed that Britain should have remained in the EU, with only 6% claiming ambivalence. I believe you can extrapolate other ideas from this too:

Whilst our subscribers vary on social and political issues. The group is generally bewildered by and opposed to cultural movements driven by nationalism, populism, protectionism and similar sentiments.
Most of our subscribers believe we should aspire (with varying detail) to liberalism and unity.

Which do you think is more important?

Equality
Liberty

Here is another great example of a data point that caught us by surprise. Our subscribers seem to value equality and liberty the same. 51% went with equality and 49% went with liberty. This indicates that our readership is not the ultra left wing branch that they are often branded as. Considering this data point, along with the answer concerning cultural appropriation, helps solidify this idea.

This data set is probably more open to interpretation than any other, so we ask the reader – what’s your takeaway?

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Understanding, Discovering and Tracking Echo Chambers

Sebastian Ullman — Wed, 26 Jul 2017 13:38:34 +0000

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.

Pinpointing the locations and workings of how the metropolitan community receives information is the first step in combatting echo chambers. In our case, a survey answered by our ECC subscribers helps us understand exactly where this takes place. Basically, this step requires identifying both the political leanings of our readership and the news sites that inform them.

To start we find out where our subscribers go for news which forces us to confront some very important questions, do they actually get their information online, or via offline modes of information distribution? Does social media truly influence what this group thinks? How do the relationships between different types of media work? Are they more likely to share what is on the front page of the news? It turns out that our subscribers go first to the websites of their favourite news sites, then to Facebook, then to Twitter. So, easily accessible online media plays a massive role.

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.

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Privilege and the Echo Chamber Club

Alice Thwaite — Mon, 17 Jul 2017 15:10:17 +0000

Privilege and the Echo Chamber Club

I received an angry email yesterday from a subscriber about the first Trump newsletter I’ve published in a while. It looked to explain why Trump’s supporters still approve of Trump despite the Russian scandal. It looked to media sites like Breitbart, Milo Yiannopolous and Fox News for our information. It also explicitly stated when these organisations made false claims. You can see it for yourself here.

“I’m in shock. This is deluded and unfounded extreme right nonsense. Especially the claim that Trump supports marginalized people. This work you’re doing is an awful disservice to people who are actually dispossessed. Maybe keep your nose in the politics on your side of the pond and unsubscribe me immediately.”

I wasn’t entirely sure what position he was coming from. I got the impression that he believed my newsletter is created for Trump supporters and these are views that I hold. This was my response:

“I really appreciate your email and I have unsubscribed you from the list. I know that a lot of the information I send out is controversial. By its very nature, I present the (often chilling) views of people who are not liberal nor progressive. This can be very hard for people to stomach.

Just so I can understand your view in a little more depth, could I ask what you were looking for from the Echo Chamber Club?

Finally – to let you know – I do not agree at all with the views I present in the newsletter. I do not believe that Trump is a good President, nor do I believe that he offers a message of hope. But other people do. These are people who have a vote, families and lives that we simply can’t access via our normal media distribution channels. That is all the ECC attempts to do – show our liberal and progressive subscribers ideas and articles that we don’t often see nor confront.”

And his response:

I wasn’t really sure what exactly the project was. I met you in person once and you took down my email. I’ve lived in Europe and while news can be quite liberal there, we absolutely have no shortage of extreme right news in the mainstream in America. There’s no void that your project is filling. Trump voters have Fox news that religiously supports him from the beginning to now, various moderate conservative print news, and extreme right political talk shows on public radio. The election results could not have been possible without the massive influence these outlets have on a national scale. Im sorry, but I still feel you are out of touch with what the American public has access to/”what they need”. You responded patiently, so I felt obliged to respond patiently, but I really don’t wish to discuss further.

After receiving this I vaguely remembered meeting him about 9 months ago. I don’t believe I would have subscribed him to the newsletter myself, but he may have subscribed whilst we chatted and I was next to him. I think it’s fair to say that he comes from a marginalised group. This is a group who fear persecution from Trump and Trump supporters. It would naturally be an emotive topic for him, in a way that perhaps I cannot emotionally relate to, because I am not from that group.

To address his claim directly:

Are extreme right-wing views more mainstream in America compared to Europe?

I would summarise his first point as follows: “There are a lot more right-wing mainstream media outlets in America compared to Europe

Ordinarily, I’d message someone back to ensure I entirely understood their point of view, but the emailer explicitly stated he did not want to be contacted again. I hope he would agree with this version of his argument.

I would agree that more ‘extreme’ right news organisations are household names in America (and indeed all over the world) compared to European publications. I can’t immediately think of European publications that have the same weight and influence as these two. In the UK we might point to the Daily Mail and the Express. I wouldn’t really put these in the same category as Fox News, Breitbart and Infowars. I’m not sure about similar news organisations elsewhere in the world.

I want to make clear that this is just me trusting my gut. I have no data to back up this claim, nor have I read any studies which mean that I can speak about this with authority.

Nevertheless, in the UK, many believe right-wing mainstream news is directly responsible for pushing a hate filled agenda and influencing Brexit.

So I suppose I’m saying that I get his point to an extent. My response is that American media is completely different to other media, but this does not mean it is not comparable with what happens in other countries.

Americans have greater accessibility to alternative points of view than Europeans

To move onto his second point which I believe can be summarised as follows: “these right-wing mainstream outlets are a lot more accessible to metropolitan readers compared to Europe”

Very few of us who consider ourselves to be progressive or liberal decide to check out Breitbart every morning. It’s emotionally draining and we’ve frankly got better things to do. I would guess that the only time we do look at Breitbart is if one of their journalists has made a particularly inflammatory point.

This is the point of the Echo Chamber Club. You might be aware of different groups existence, but we want to show you a different point of view which gives ultimate credence and respect to those that hold it. What’s more, we find as many different groups, views and ideas as possible and offer a wide variety of perspectives to our audience. Frankly, if you did want to completely understand the extreme-right, then I would recommend you read Breitbart every day, and not that you sign up to our newsletter. However, in the past 5 weeks alone we’ve looked at caste discrimination, libertarianism and the Handmaid’s Tale.

It’s also worth mentioning that the majority of our readers are based in the UK, and that the email scandal was front page news here for 2 days. American politics reverberate around the world.

Learn More About The Echo Chamber Club

On privilege

But there is perhaps something that the Echo Chamber Club maybe guilty of that I’d like to explore.

We come at subjects from a point of view of privilege. By its very nature, our group tend to be well-off and well-educated white people. Of course what I’m about to say isn’t true of all subscribers, but broadly: we don’t face violence and we have good jobs and income.

As a result of this, we don’t often have the emotional gut reaction to different points of view. I am not affected by the travel ban, and although I’m not particularly happy about it, I am not directly threatened by it. There will be a different emotional reaction from a person who is, and as a result cannot bear to hear the other point of view.

In which case, it’s very difficult to come up with a defence to this. The only thing I can say is that I pick my topics as thoughtfully as possible. My message is about spreading empathy and being tolerant of everyone. Even the people who we would not normally be particularly tolerant of. I’d love to hear what you think here.

Making private emails public

Finally, just to let everyone know that I have published his email and my response in full, so I have not tried to misrepresent his view at all. Equally, I do not wish to give away any information which would compromise this former subscriber’s privacy. However, it may well be that other subscribers have similar ideas, and I would very much like to hear from them. I try and be as diplomatic and open to criticism as possible. J

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The Regime of Digital Truth

Alice Thwaite — Wed, 14 Jun 2017 17:24:29 +0000

A new definition of truth?

I try to spend as much time as possible reading through papers about algorithms, data and information. I recently came across a piece called: “Le régime de vérité numérique. De la gouvernementalité algorithmique à un nouvel état de droit”. There is also an English translation which can be found here which states the title as: “The Digital Regime of Truth: From the Algorithmic Governmentality to a New Rule of Law”.

This is a lecture given by Antoinette Rouvroy in October 2014 about the impact of big data on our concept of truth, and how this may affect the choices we make and the agency we have.

Despite studying philosophy, I find it very difficult to understand texts on first reading. So I wanted to write an interpretation and summary of the lecture as I see it after reading it a couple of times. It’s also a fairly difficult translation*, so hopefully this is written in slightly plainer English, though may miss some of the nuances of what she says.

For me, the main takeaway is her insight about the way data is analysed in an age of ‘big data’ compared to before. Previously, scientists created mathematical models. These were hypothesised by people who have basic understanding of human desires and motivations – by virtue of being human themselves. These models were meant to be analogous to the physical world we live in. They were proved right or wrong according to the data that social scientists gathered about the world.

Models weren’t perfect. George Box famously said: “All models are wrong. But some are useful”. However, this acted as the gold standard scientific method for many years.

Compare this to the world of today. Now we collect a huge amount of data about actors, machines and the environment. So instead of devising models and hypotheses that can be proved successful or otherwise by the data sources, instead we just let the data ‘create hypotheses’ themselves. If we give the machines enough data points, then they can detect patterns that we may never have thought of.

It is like we are creating a parallel world. We believe that this data filled world is objective. We are able to uncover ‘truth’ about the world in a way that we have never managed to do before. And given we have created this parallel world with event sources that we can track, we believe we can create some objective certainty.

The Big Data Ideology

Chris Anderson wrote in Wired in 2008:

“This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.”

The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete

Seems like a good idea, right?

Well, no, argues Rouvroy. She believes that if we think like this, then all our notions of meaning and truth are thrown into crisis. This crisis she calls the ‘crisis of representation’. We doubt the knowledge that we create with our own human minds, the experiences that we have, the causation and correlations that we believe and experience.

In addition to this, the insight we get from a world of data is not the objective truth. This is because there are many parts of our human experience that cannot be reduced to specific data points nor events.

For example, you cannot create a data point for all the things a person chooses not to do. You cannot account for overwhelming emotion like misery nor what it feels like to act because of pity. You also cannot document the future using this data. All the data points we have will account for the immediate present and the past – we cannot account for all the possibilities of what can happen in the future.

What’s more, the data that is used to create this objective world is ‘cleaned’ to an extent. In order to make sure it is a data point that can be accurately interpreted, then often ambiguity from the data point is removed. So even the data which is in the ‘black box’ isn’t totally accurate nor representative of our real world.

This would be fine if we didn’t have such high expectations of data. These data sources are being used to summarise and hypothesise on the world around us. We believe that access to more data will given us a better understanding of the world. Often, what we mean by this is that we have a ‘more objective’ understanding of the world. If we believe that the ‘truth’ and ‘objectivity’ in the world can be governed by the data we mine, then this can be thought of as a new ideology. Rouvroy refers to this as a ‘big data ideology’: “each epoch has its own way to make the real manageable without it ever being accessible”.

So if the data reveals something about the world that we cannot understand without the data, then we believe this to be the actuality of the world. She states:

“The concept of truth is increasingly wrapped up at the expense of pure reality or pure actuality, to the extent that eventually things seem to be speaking by themselves.”

Disobedience and Human Agency

When it comes to big data, we have got excited about the abilities of these new technologies to make accurate predictions about the world. Therefore, our current actions will dictate what we believe the consequences of said actions will be in the future.

However, this would be terrible for human agency, argues Rouvroy. This takes away the possibility that people and objects could behave differently to what we believe might happen.

It is already the case that decisions about the future are made by analysing what we think might happen. We sentence criminals based on their likelihood to reoffend. There is often talk of life and health insurance premiums being directed on your likelihood to develop certain diseases.

However, when we start to base these decisions on the new ‘big data ideology’, we use this virtual world to make critical decisions which relate to humans and animals that are multi-faceted, and exist beyond the virtual world. This fiction causes decisions that will affect our lives.

Rouvroy states this is “by-passing subjectivity”. It takes away some of our potential disobedience to what the virtual world claimed was possible. To expand on this point, if we are governed by data and ‘intelligence logic’ then we begin to give credence to events that haven’t actually happened yet. We value the predictive power of the data source higher than what happens in our real world. As a result, we are moving from a penal logic to an intelligence logic, and this fully calls into question our ability to choose. It could be the data ideology that means we are totally powerless.

Why Am I Interested In This?

The area that I would like to improve is information access. At the moment, it feels like algorithms and the data sources we collect are influencing the decisions we make. I like to read more and more about the consequences of living in a world where the information we see is governed by algorithms. This is a critical paper to read.

There is a lot more to this lecture – I have to admit that I’ve read it a lot of times now and I still don’t feel that I’ve hit on the absolute crux of it. Nevertheless, I feel that thinking about data in this way can help us understand how and why it feels like we’re out of control of our environment. It could easily be because we care so much about simplifying our world that the truth of it is slipping away from us.

*If you are keen to read the translation – it may be helpful to know that ‘the actual’ may be a half translation of the French which is ‘actualitié’. This translates as ‘news’ too. I got most benefit from thinking about ‘the actual’ as events that can be recorded. For those who have experience in digital marketing then this terminology may make sense, I’d welcome a better translation!

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Call for funding: would your organisation be able to help the ECC?

Alice Thwaite — Thu, 01 Jun 2017 07:00:12 +0000

As you might be aware, I have accepted a place at the Oxford Internet Institute (part of Oxford University) to study an MSc in the Social Sciences of the Internet. The course starts at the beginning of October. My key focus will be on the philosophy and sociology of information access. I’d like to research echo chambers and their impact on society.

You may wonder why I’ve chosen to formally educate myself further in this area when I’m already running the ECC.

I firmly believe that if you want to find a solution to a problem then you first need to know exactly what the problem is. I would like to be around the best possible people to help me figure out how information can and should be accessed online. What would work best for a democracy? How are online communities (large and small) currently structured? How do we regain trust in the ‘facts’ we see online? And who will own future platforms and how might they be monetised?

The hope is I might be able to turn the ECC into a robust and credible organisation which can promote better methodologies for information access as well as improve the way we communicate in a digital world.

However, you should not underestimate the amount of work required to complete a Masters at Oxford. Already working on the ECC is a full-time job. Although some of this work will be accelerated and condensed into the studying I’ll do for the degree, at the same time I have to be realistic about the administrative work that eats up the bulk of my time. This includes marketing, media monitoring, finding potential contributors and writers for the ECC newsletter and podcast, financial upkeep and putting articles into the correct format for our various types of distribution. For this reason, to ensure that the Echo Chamber Club continues, I would like to raise enough money to pay an employee to take the administrative and marketing work off my hands.

I will still be intrinsically involved in the project. I will ensure that we are going out of our way to find different points of view. I will ensure we keep our editorial integrity and mission statement.

I’m not looking for a crazy amount of money either. A few thousand pounds a month will enable me to hire the quality person I need. Given this is a social project, I’m hoping to raise this money via donations from institutions, corporations and individuals. These entities will become our sponsors and patrons.

So I need your help!

If you know an organisation, institution or individual who is troubled by information access in the Western world, who cares about innovative and out-of-the-box thinking, and wants to support independent curated journalism, and may be able to offer a substantial monthly donation then please get in touch! My email address is editor@echochamber.club.

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