2020-2021 Fellows Research
Are Campuses Echo Chambers Exploring the Information Networks of Contemporary Students by Nicholas F. Havey PhD Candidate, University of California, Los Angeles
A Note on This Executive Summary In the interest of readability, this executive summary was written to provide a brief overview of the project, the methodology that was used, and the key findings. A more detailed description of the undergirding literature, theory, and methods is available upon request to the author - nfh@g.ucla.edu.
Introduction and Problem Statement The current political fragmentation of the United States has important consequences for civic engagement and the future of democracy. Both ends of the political spectrum engage in ideological homophily (Bright, 2018; Colleoni, Rozza, & Arvidsson, 2014; Stepanyan, Borau, & Ullrich, 2010) and the customizable nature of media consumption offered by social media sites like Twitter and Facebook contributes directly to this. By facilitating users’ selective exposure to consonant news, platforms like Twitter reinforce users’ existing beliefs, allow them to evade cognitive dissonance, facilitate media illiteracy, and enable hostile and uninformed discourse that only exacerbates fragmentation (Garrett, 2009; Kahne & Bowyer, 2017; Knobloch-Westerwick et al., 2017). The lapse in attention to facts and accuracy that results from the creation of online, ideologically driven “ad hoc publics” (Bright, 2018, p. 1) is well-documented and evident in growing perceptions of the media as hostile and biased (Barberá, et al., 2015; Barberá, 2015; Gil de Zúñiga & Chen, 2019; Price & Kaufhold, 2019; Weeks, et al., 2019). On college campuses, political fragmentation is similarly evident, particularly in qualitative studies of politically-engaged students (Binder & Wood, 2014; Havey, 2020a), which document increasing partisan splits between students along the political spectrum. Within this contemporary online media ecosystem, the burden of evaluating the quality of information, formerly the purview and responsibility of news outlets and publishers, has shifted to the user (Flanagin & Metzger, 2007). This shift is concerning given that information consumers consistently seek out news consistent with their beliefs and rely on heuristics, such as the assent of other users in their social media feed, as proxies for credibility and relevance (Metzger et al., 2010; Metzger et al., 2020; Pearson & Knobloch-Westerwick, 2018). It is even more concerning because, under experimental conditions, most information consumers were unsuccessful when evaluating the credibility of the information they had found (Wineburg & McGrew, 2019). There is thus a two-pronged problem: 1) people are already bad at evaluating the information they consume and distribute and 2) they have become increasingly reliant on their social networks to drive their information exposure and consumption, relying on collective assent as a proxy for reliability and informed choice. This increasing lack of effort to evaluate information may be contributing to more partisan 1