The “infodemic”, echo chambers, and clusters
This article talks about how in 2020, along with the coronavirus pandemic, there is an “infodemic”, the overload of information. They specifically talk about a couple who had to quarantine in a hotel for 14 days, and all they had to do was read the news. Ofcourse, when COVID was in the beginning stages, the amount of information was unprecedented, and so much of it was information on it becoming worse and worse. This ambush of information can cause confusion with whether information is true or not. The World Health Organization explained this phenomena as when there’s too much information, readers and users of the internet don’t have the time to sort out what’s accurate and what’s not. This is what makes this COVID pandemic different from the other pandemics, the amount of information being spread. All this information is being spread through social media, and this allows disinformation to especially flourish and spread. Disinformation is fake news that captures the reader’s attention with anxiety and panic, usually with headlines and captions that aim to scare the reader. This creates a hostile environment for those on social media, and can create echo chambers.
Echo chambers is a phenomena where information ends up being kept within a community of people due to them not wanting to change their mind. Specifically, people will believe and reinforce information that reflects the beliefs they already have. Even if information is false, people part of these echo chambers will fail to see the invalidity of them because everyone else in the echo chamber is sharing information that follows the same belief. The occurrence of echo chambers is gaining particular momentum due to the “infodemic” because the spread of disinformation is more and more popular. These echo chambers can be represented as clusters as discussed in the Networks module: Diffusion. These two concepts can be interchanged because like echo chambers, in clusters, the penetration of information from outside clusters into them is very hard.
This can be explored with the density of clusters. The density of a cluster “p” can be a set of people such that each person in the set has at least a “p” fraction of its network neighbors in the set. In this case, echo chambers with people that have a high amount of neighbors within the cluster then outside would have a high density. These high density clusters then reinforce false information to be believed among the people in them. Furthermore, the information overload as explained in this article can also explain the rise of echo chambers/clusters. With an overabundance of information, some accurate and some false, people need to pick what they want to believe. So with a wide array of information, obviously there will be people picking certain information to believe in, thus creating clusters of people with differing beliefs based on what information they chose to believe in. And with more and more disinformation being spread, this only concentrates these echo chambers, making their density higher.
Furthermore, the concept about strong and weak ties is also relevant for echo chambers. This is because if two people share a strong tie, they will likely trust each other because they benefit from sharing a post or liking a post on social media, and vice versa. Thus people with strong ties will likely just keep choosing to share and receive information with those strong ties and not interact with the weak ties. This also creates echo chambers, and is vulnerable to the overload of information during this pandemic. How do people sort through a vast amount of information? It can be quite overwhelming and instinctual for people to want to have a consistent set of beliefs and information to avoid uncertainty. This can explain why clusters are formed, and how they grow stronger and more stubborn thus creating echo chambers.