Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Here’s what happens when political bubbles collide

Image of echo chambers and information gerrymandering.

Information gerrymandering occurs when there is asymmetry in how bubbles collide. In the example shown at the bottom, the blue party has split its influence, so that some members are open to persuasion from the red party.

Image courtesy: Alexander J. Stewart and Joshua B. Plotkin

Stewart is an assistant professor of Mathematical Biology at the University of Houston. Plotkin is a professor of Biology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Social media has transformed how people talk to each other. But social media platforms are not shaping up to be the utopian spaces for human connection their founders hoped.

Instead, the internet has introduced phenomena that can influence national elections and maybe even threaten democracy.

Echo chambers or "bubbles" – in which people interact mainly with others who share their political views – arise from the way communities organize themselves online.


When the organization of a social network affects political discussion on a large scale, the consequences can be enormous.

In our study released this month, we show that what happens at the connection points, where bubbles collide, can significantly sway political decisions toward one party or another. We call this phenomenon "information gerrymandering."

It's problematic when people derive all their information from inside their bubble. Even if it's factual, the information people get from their bubble may be selected to confirm their prior assumptions. In contemporary U.S. politics, this is a likely contributor to increasing political polarization in the electorate.

But that's not the whole story. Most people have a foot outside of their political bubbles. They read news from a range of sources and talk to some friends with different opinions and experiences than their own.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

The balance between the influence coming from inside and outside a bubble matters a lot for shaping a person's views. This balance is different for different people: One person who leans Democrat may hear political arguments overwhelmingly from other Democrats, while another may hear equally from Democrats and Republicans.

From the perspective of the parties who are trying to win the public debate, what's important is how their influence is spread out across the social network.

What we show in our study, mathematically and empirically, is that a party's influence on a social network can be broken up, in a way analogous to electoral gerrymandering of congressional districts.

In our study, information gerrymandering was intentional: We structured our social networks to produce bias. In the real world, things are more complicated, of course. Social network structures grow out of individual behavior, and that behavior is influenced by the social media platforms themselves.

Information gerrymandering gives one party an advantage in persuading voters. The party that has an advantage, we show, is the party that does not split up its influence and leave its members open to persuasion from the other side.

This isn't just a thought experiment – it's something we have measured and tested in our research.

Our colleagues at MIT asked over 2,500 people, recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk, to play a simple voting game in groups of 24.

The players were assigned to one of two parties. The game was structured to reward party loyalty, but also to reward compromise: If your party won with 60% of the votes or more, each party member received US$2. If your party compromised to help the other party reach 60% of the votes, each member received 50 cents. If no party won, the game was deadlocked and no one was paid.

We structured the game this way to mimic the real world tensions between voters' intrinsic party preferences and the desire to compromise on important issues.

In our game, each player updated their voting intentions over time, in response to information about other people's voting intentions, which they received through their miniature social network. The players saw, in real time, how many of their connections intended to vote for their party. We placed players in different positions on the network, and we arranged their social networks to produce different types of colliding bubbles.

The experimental games and networks were superficially fair. Parties had the same number of members, and each person had the same amount of influence on other people. Still, we were able to build networks that gave one party a huge advantage, so that they won close to 60% of the vote, on average.

To understand the effect of the social network on voters' decisions, we counted up who is connected to whom, accounting for their party preferences. Using this measure, we were able to accurately predict both the direction of the bias arising from information gerrymandering and the proportion of the vote received by each party in our simple game.

We also measured information gerrymandering in real-world social networks.

We looked at published data on people's media consumption, comprising 27,852 news items shared by 938 Twitter users in the weeks leading up to the 2016 presidential election, as well as over 250,000 political tweets from 18,470 individuals in the weeks leading up to the 2010 U.S. midterm elections.

We also looked at the political blogosphere, examining how 1,490 political blogs linked to one another in the two months preceding the 2004 U.S. presidential election.

We found that these social networks have bubble structures similar to those constructed for our experiments.

The effects that we saw in our experiments are similar to what happens when politicians gerrymander congressional districts.

A party can draw congressional districts that are superficially fair – each district is contained within a single border, and contains the same number of voters – but that actually lead to systematic bias, allowing one party to win more seats than the proportion of votes they receive.

Electoral gerrymandering is subtle. You often know it when you see it on a map, but a rule to determine when districts are gerrymandered is complicated to define, which was a sticking point in the recent U.S. Supreme Court case on the issue.

In a similar way, information gerrymandering leads to social networks that are superficially fair. Each party can have the same number of voters with the same amount of influence, but the network structure nonetheless gives an advantage to one party.

Counting up who is connected to whom allowed us to develop a measure we call the "influence gap." This mathematical description of information gerrymandering predicted the voting outcomes in our experiments. We believe this measure is useful for understanding how real-world social networks are organized, and how their structure will bias decision making.

Debate about how social media platforms are organized, as well as the consequences for individual behavior and for democracy, will continue for years to come. But we propose that thinking in terms of network-level concepts like bubbles and the connections between bubbles can provide a better grasp on these problems.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Conversation

Read More

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris debating

Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris debate on Sept. 10.

Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post via Getty Images

The state of our nation: Polling Americans’ priorities for election 2024

Originally published by The 19th.

This is the third annual poll from The 19th and SurveyMonkey, designed to shed light on what women, particularly women of color, and LGBTQ+ people think about the issues animating our politics. It comes as Americans face another critical election, one that could make Democrat Kamala Harris the first woman to hold the country’s highest office or give Republican Donald Trump a second term. Here’s what we learned about how Americans view the candidates, as well as opinions on abortion and on reproductive care more broadly, the ability to access gender-affirming care and more.

Keep ReadingShow less
Happy elementary students raising their hands on a class at school
skynesher/Getty Images

Project 2025: A threat to equitable education

Johnson is a United Methodist pastor, the author of "Holding Up Your Corner: Talking About Race in Your Community" and program director for the Bridge Alliance, which houses The Fulcrum.

This is part of a series offering a nonpartisan counter to Project 2025, a conservative guideline to reforming government and policymaking during the first 180 days of a second Trump administration. The Fulcrum's cross partisan analysis of Project 2025 relies on unbiased critical thinking, reexamines outdated assumptions, and uses reason, scientific evidence, and data in analyzing and critiquing Project 2025.

Michelle Obama resonated deeply at the Democratic National Convention.

"Shutting down the Department of Education, banning our books — none of that will prepare our kids for the future," she said.

Keep ReadingShow less
Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift made another call for peopleto register to vote at the Video Music Awards on Thursday.

Christopher Polk/Billboard via Getty Images

What will Taylor Swift's endorsement of Kamala Harris mean?

Nevins is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.

On Sep 11, we reported in The Fulcrum thatTaylor Swift had entered the political fray by endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for president of the United States. I ended the article by stating that “the full extent of her impact remains to be seen.”

Now only a few days later, some data is already suggesting the impact could be significant. The day after Swift endorsed Harris there was a significant surge of visitors to Vote.gov, the U.S. government website that helps citizens understand how they can register to vote. According to a spokesperson for the Government Services Administration, Swift’s endorsement on Instagram led directly to 337,826 people visiting the site.

Keep ReadingShow less
Social Security card, treasury check and $100 bills
JJ Gouin/Getty Images

In swing states, both parties agree on ideas to save Social Security

A new public consultation survey finds significant bipartisan support for major Social Security proposals — including ideas to increase revenue and cut benefits — that would reduce the program’s long-term shortfall by 78 percent and extend the program’s longevity for decades.

Without any reforms to revenues or benefits, the Social Security Trust Fund will be depleted by 2033, and benefits will be cut for all retirees.

Keep ReadingShow less