Do we live in online bubbles?

© 2021 EPFL - Taking a novel perspective, researchers have studied political polarization in online news consumption rather than content production, looking at whether the backlink structure of online news networks alone, or users' explicit reading choices contribute to the partisan divide. In the past decade it seems political polarization has been on the rise, as measured by voting behavior and general affect towards opposing partisans and their parties. Much research has focused on the role of the internet as a driver of this polarization, particularly looking at content production, that is newspaper articles, tweets, Reddit posts etc., mostly because production is easier to measure than content consumption. Now, scientists from EPFL's Data Science Lab (dlab) in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences , with colleagues from MIT and the Mozilla Foundation have analyzed the browsing and reading habits of tens of thousands of people using a plugin used with the Firefox browser, for the first time gaining a glimpse at polarization from a content consumption perspective.  "Echo chambers are not a new thing but the real replication of these memes happens online. Until now, a lot of polarization research has been around content production because this is what we can easily measure. This population of Firefox users consented to share their data - it's like some people donate blood for the common good, here people donated their data for the common good," said Head of the Data Science Lab, Assistant Professor Robert West, and the study's lead author.