Abstract

Social media has been accused of forming an information-limiting environment by supplying users with narrow & biased pool of information. Scholars have proposed various phenomena such as echo chambers and filter bubbles to explain the reason behind such effects. The conceptualization and operationalization of research on these phenomena is under development and has so far resulted in mixed evidence about social media’s role in polarising citizens. In this paper, we theorize the characteristics of information environment in terms of information sources, information encountered, and information shared on social media and explore relationships among them to get a deeper understanding of these phenomena. We propose to use digital trace data of Twitter users to study these relationships. The findings of this research will contribute toward identifying presence of Echo-chamber on social media and elaborating the role of information characteristics like information source & slant in creating such echo-chambers.

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