Research Article: “Users Polarization on Facebook and YouTube”

The full text article linked to below was recently published by PLOS One.
Title
Users Polarization on Facebook and Youtube
Authors
Alessandro Bessi
IUSS, Pavia, Italy, CSSLab, IMT Lucca, Italy
Fabiana Zollo
CSSLab, IMT Lucca, Italy
Michela Del Vicario
CSSLab, IMT Lucca, Italy
Michelangelo Puliga
CSSLab, IMT Lucca, Italy
Antonio Scala
CSSLab, IMT Lucca, Italy, ISC, CNR, Rome, Italy
Guido Caldarelli
CSSLab, IMT Lucca, Italy, ISC, CNR, Rome, Italy
Brian Uzzi
Northwestern University
Walter Quattrociocchi
CSSLab, IMT Lucca, Italy, ISC, CNR, Rome, Italy
Source
PLoS ONE 11(8): e0159641
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0159641
Abstract

Users online tend to select information that support and adhere their beliefs, and to form polarized groups sharing the same view—e.g. echo chambers. Algorithms for content promotion may favour this phenomenon, by accounting for users preferences and thus limiting the exposure to unsolicited contents.
To shade light on this question, we perform a comparative study on how same contents (videos) are consumed on different online social media—i.e. Facebook and YouTube—over a sample of 12M of users.
Our findings show that content drives the emergence of echo chambers on both platforms. Moreover, we show that the users’ commenting patterns are accurate predictors for the formation of echo-chambers.

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