Exploring Echo Chambers in Twitter during Two Spanish Regional Elections: An Analysis of Community Interactions

Abstract

The integration of digital technology in modern society has led to an increased importance of the analysis of the digital environment in political elections. The concept of echo chambers and their influence on social networks has received significant attention in recent academic investigations. Echo chambers are commonly referred to as the digital bubble where users participate in a conversation mostly with like-minded others, and it is usually related not only to homophily but can also be directly associated with the effects of social media algorithms. This study examines the Twitter interactions during two Spanish regional elections. Data collection has been performed through Twitter Streaming API, which resulted in a total dataset of 5.5 million tweets. The study analyzes how the political communities interact inside and between them. Also, we replicate this analysis by grouping the political communities by two main affinity blocks (left-right) to evaluate if the effects of homophily are even higher under this hypothesis. Finally, the text of the tweets was analyzed to reinforce the community-interaction analysis and to conduct a sentiment analysis of the interactions. The research results indicate that within each political party community, interactions predominantly occur among individuals who hold similar political views, leading to the creation of echo chambers. These echo chambers become even more powerful when parties are unified into political affinity blocks, with over 97% of interactions occurring within each left-right block. This study aims to contribute to the ongoing academic debate by providing relevant data and reinforcing aspects studied by previous researchers.

Keywords

• network analysis
• twitter
• spain
• echo chamber
• homophily