During the Brexit campaign, most Twitter users only engaged fellow partisans, not opponents.
Evidence
In 2018, some clever Italian researchers decided to try to disentangle this question by looking at Twitter posts and hashtags during the UK’s heated 2016 Brexit referendum. They scraped over 5 million tweets between 15 April and 24 June 2016 (the campaign period) using keywords and hashtags such as ‘referendum’, ‘no2eu’, ‘iwantout’, and ‘lovenotleave’. Through geocoded tweets, locations that were visible in a user’s profile, and location information that appeared in a user’s tweet, the researchers were able to link online tweets to a geographical location. Users were then classified as either part of the ‘Leave’ or ‘Remain’ campaign based on the hashtags they used. If online and offline echo chambers have nothing to do with each other, then someone’s physical location is not going to be related to their online activity. This is our baseline assumption. … The results were fascinating. First, regardless of location, a stunning 69 per cent of messages tweeted by those who affiliated with the Leave campaign were ‘in-bubble’, that is, directed towards other Leave campaigners. Only 9 per cent of messages were directed towards Remainers, and so ‘cross-bubble’ communication was minimal. The same phenomenon was visible on the Remain side, with only 10 per cent of users tweeting messages to Leave campaigners whereas 68 per cent of messages went to fellow Remainers. In other words, there is strong evidence of an online echo-chamber effect. — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof, 429
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: Slavery-conference attendees discussed the event live on Twitter worldwide — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots: My Fight with Harvard…, 631; Echo-chamber clustering is much stronger on Facebook and Twitter than Reddit — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 444
Broader Connections
- Echo-chamber clustering is much stronger on Facebook and Twitter than Reddit
#corroborates(0.80) — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof, 444 - Slavery-conference attendees discussed the event live on Twitter worldwide
#exemplifies(0.75) — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 631