Alternative Echo Chambers? How Users of Alt Social Media Sites Share Sources

• In Event: Exploring Right Wing Social Media Sites

Abstract

The rise of partisan-oriented alternative social media sites such as Parler and Truth Social has led to concern about the narrowing of the news and information diet of people who use them. Given the fertile environment for an echo chamber on these sites, do partisans in these spaces share information from counter-ideological sources? And if such sources are shared, how do users on these sites react to information that may not comport with their worldview?

This study draws on a collection of roughly 600,000 posts made in June 2022 by 200 prominent users of each of 7 alternative social media sites (Bitchute, Gab, Gettr, Parler, Rumble, Telegram and Truth Social). Researchers then used these posts to track discussion of 6 key issues from that month, including topics like vaccines, the January 6 hearings, and abortion.

We show that among these users, left-leaning sources were shared much less frequently across issues than right-leaning sources and so-called mainstream sources were shared much less frequently than newer or less-established sites, suggesting some evidence for a limited echo chamber – though the volume of information from each of these source types was dwarfed by information coming from other social media sites, and the presence of counter-attitudinal sources at all calls into question how entrenched any echo chambers actually are. Through a subsequent content analysis of these posts, we also find that counter-attitudinal sources were largely rejected or ignored, pointing to a complex role for different types of information in these environments.

Authors

• Galen Stocking, Pew Research Center

• Regina L Widjaya, Pew Research Center