Echo Chambers vs Filter Bubbles: a Political Audit of Twitter Recommender System (Pre-Recorded)

• In Event: Social Media and Polarization

Abstract

Although social media only recently emerged, the accumulation of evidence undermining the ‘echo chamber’ hypothesis is striking. While self-selective exposure to congruent content - echo chamber - is not as salient as expected, the ideological bias induced solely by algorithmic selection - filter bubble - has been less scrutinized.

In this study, we propose a new experimental research design to investigate recommender systems. To avoid any behavioral confounder, we rely on automated agents, which 'treat' the algorithm with ideological and behavioral cues. For each agent, we compare the ideology of the recommended timeline with the ideology of the chronological one and, hence, isolate the ideological bias of the recommender system. This allows us to investigate two main questions : (1) how much bias is induced by the recommender system? (2) what role is played by implicit and explicit cues, when triggering ideological recommendations?

The experiment features 160 automated agents, which were active three weeks before and three weeks after the 2020 American presidential election. We find out that, after three weeks of delivering ideological cues (following accounts and liking content), the average algorithmic bias is about 5%. In other words, the timeline as structured by the algorithm entails 5% less cross-cutting content than it does when it is structured chronologically. While the algorithm relies on both implicit and explicit cues to formulate recommendations, the effect of implicit cues seems larger.

This study is, up to our knowledge, the first experimental assessment of the ideological bias induced by the recommender system of a major social media platform. Recommendations are biased and rely above all on behavioral cues unwarily and passively shared by the user. As affective polarization grows as a contemporary challenge, our results raise important normative questions about the possibility of opting-out from the ideological bias of recommender systems. In addition, it points out that more transparency is urgently needed around the recommendation questions: How are algorithms trained? What cues do they use? Against which biases have they been tested? In parallel, the results demonstrate the failure of ‘in-house bias correction’ and calls for an external auditing framework, that would facilitate this kind of research and crowd-sourced the scrutiny of recommender systems.

Authors

• Benjamin Guinaudeau

• Simon Roth