Invasiveness, Intrusiveness and Influence: Three New Metrics for Measuring Communication between Political Echo Chambers

Session

Political Science

Description

The emergence of digital social networks introduced the concept of political echo chambers, networks aligned to specific political ideologies whose membership don’t trust people from the other side. Political echo chambers exist under an implicit assumption of insulation from other competing echo chambers. However, beyond the presumptive insulation underpinning both the echo chamber scholarly definition and popular perceptions about it, empirically we know almost nothing about echo chamber insulation, its socio-technological character as well as its impermeability. Only recently scholars have begun to establish some conceptual toolkits about political echo chambers’ inner dynamics and their communication with the outside world. Those conceptual efforts notwithstanding, the problem of empirically measuring cross-echo chamber communication persists. How do we measure the communication between political echo chambers? If political echo chambers are not that insulated from the outside world―and other political echo chambers― as previously assumed, how can we measure their exchange with those other political echo chambers? How can we measure their import-export information flow as well as their influence vis-à-vis other political echo chambers? We respond to those concerns by proposing three graph-level metrics, invasiveness, influence, and intrusiveness, where invasiveness measure how much a certain network manages to invade its opponent’s space (and comparatively, which network invasiveness dominates the other); influence, measures the quality of that information flow, and intrusiveness measures the penetrability of information into an adversary echo chamber.

Session Chair

Shqipe Mjekiqi

Session Co-Chair

Artan Mustafa

Proceedings Editor

Edmond Hajrizi

ISBN

978-9951-437-96-7

Location

Lipjan, Kosovo

Start Date

31-10-2020 11:20 AM

End Date

31-10-2020 12:50 PM

DOI

10.33107/ubt-ic.2020.458

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Oct 31st, 11:20 AM Oct 31st, 12:50 PM

Invasiveness, Intrusiveness and Influence: Three New Metrics for Measuring Communication between Political Echo Chambers

Lipjan, Kosovo

The emergence of digital social networks introduced the concept of political echo chambers, networks aligned to specific political ideologies whose membership don’t trust people from the other side. Political echo chambers exist under an implicit assumption of insulation from other competing echo chambers. However, beyond the presumptive insulation underpinning both the echo chamber scholarly definition and popular perceptions about it, empirically we know almost nothing about echo chamber insulation, its socio-technological character as well as its impermeability. Only recently scholars have begun to establish some conceptual toolkits about political echo chambers’ inner dynamics and their communication with the outside world. Those conceptual efforts notwithstanding, the problem of empirically measuring cross-echo chamber communication persists. How do we measure the communication between political echo chambers? If political echo chambers are not that insulated from the outside world―and other political echo chambers― as previously assumed, how can we measure their exchange with those other political echo chambers? How can we measure their import-export information flow as well as their influence vis-à-vis other political echo chambers? We respond to those concerns by proposing three graph-level metrics, invasiveness, influence, and intrusiveness, where invasiveness measure how much a certain network manages to invade its opponent’s space (and comparatively, which network invasiveness dominates the other); influence, measures the quality of that information flow, and intrusiveness measures the penetrability of information into an adversary echo chamber.