[luckylion]

> Social media users have been found to encounter more diverse news than non-users. And even when we think about people holding extremist views, findings suggest them to be even more engaged with the mainstream news compared to other news users—after all, they are interested to know what “the enemy” might be up to.

But that's perfectly compatible with echo chambers. They will interact with the outside world, but their interpretation of things that happen comes from within the echo chamber. Anti-Vaxxers know that there are people believing in vaccinations, they read about them in the papers, but then they might just post a comment "it's what Bill Gates wants you to believe so he can sell more 5G towers to Huawei". The echo chamber does echo their world view and interpretation of events, and just exposing them to "diverse news" won't change that, or we really wouldn't have a large variety of fringe groups.

[anorakoverflow]

You raise very valid points. The case you describe would be characterised as “oppositional reading” of mainstream media by those believing in a conspiracy.

However, this is unrelated to the common understanding echo chambers. A big problem with the concept is that there is no robust definition, and the fact that it is used widely in mainstream discussion does not make it easier. The tendency to preferentially connect or communicate with like-minded people (homophily) is nothing new, we encounter it everywhere—think hobby groups, special-interest forums like HN etc. Social media’s affordances especially promote homophily. What the filter bubble/echo chamber concepts add to this preference is an exclusion of outsiders. The above commenter summarised a purported consequence as “you’re sucked into an echo chamber with only news that confirms your views”. In this sense, using diverse news would be incompatible with an echo chamber.

What is especially interesting, then, is that ideological polarisation is very much alive on the internet, despite (or indeed because of) the absence of echo chambers.

I thoroughly recommend the article I linked above. It touches upon these concepts and cites current research that allows you to dig deeper.

[luckylion]

Thank you for the explanation!

It's difficult with academic researchers using terms with significantly different meaning from the public at large. I wonder whether it's more harm- than useful, as it'll typically lead to the public either misunderstanding what they say or dismiss them completely because they're "obviously talking nonsense".

The scientific research into echo chambers seems almost straw-man-y, e.g. "echo chambers are perfectly sealed to the outside, no contact whatsoever is possible", so they check and find "that's not really happening" because people might talk about politics with one group exclusively, but will also talk about sports so they're not in an echo chamber. Does that provide value, when they are in a political echo chamber?

[anorakoverflow]

The problem with scientific terminology is widely recognised in communication science. The issue is that while terms used by disciplines such as physics, law or medicine are sufficiently esoteric that someone “on the outside” wouldn’t use their terms casually, so they are somewhat protected from “watering down” their concepts in public discourse—or not, as we are seeing with anti-vax ideology, for instance. Terms in communication science also carry specific meaning to those who know them, but can just as well be interpreted as everyday language by outsiders.

I also get what you mean by “straw-man-y”. I think the issue is that definitions have to be robust and hypotheses falsifiable in order to make them researchable, so they must be kind of stringent. Exactly as you say, someone might be in a political echo chamber, but that is not their entire life. They have peers, family, friends, colleagues that also expose them to political information. By focusing so much on the online, the echo chamber assumption was very limited from the start.