YouTube comments reveal scant evidence of political echo chambers

Conservative and liberal viewers on YouTube engage in crosstalk—although it’s mostly one-sided—with conservatives commenting on left-leaning videos twice as much as liberals remarking on right-leaning videos, according to a large-scale study from the University of Michigan School of Information. Left-leaning channels had a quarter of their comments from conservative users and more than 1 in 10 comments on right-leaning channels were from liberal users, dispelling the notion of echo chambers where people of like mind and politics see only information that meshes with their existing beliefs. The study analyzing 134 million comments from 9.3 million users showed most people who commented 10 or more times posted at least once in both left- and right-leaning channels. Moreover, the conservatives participating on left-leaning channels were not there just to troll; their comments were not significantly more toxic than those from liberals, although cross-partisan replies could generate some heated responses in both directions. Lead author Siqi Wu, who began the work at the Australian National University and is now a research fellow in the U-M Center for Social Media Responsibility, said a tendency for selective exposure—a theory that finds people deliberately avoid information that challenges their viewpoints—thereby creating the echo chamber, does not…
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