ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
The echo chamber effect on social media.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 321 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
321 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 1,753 citations in OpenAlex.
- Drivers of health polarization during the COVID-19 pandemic: A systematic review.Science advances · 2025Pooled it
- Psychological factors contributing to the creation and dissemination of fake news among social media users: a systematic review.BMC psychology · 2024Pooled it
- Investigation of Misleading Techniques Used in Online Fluoride Misinformation.International journal of dental hygiene · 2026Article
- Maternity-Leave Related TikTok Videos: A Cross-Sectional Analysis of Content and Viewer Engagement.Maternal and child health journal · 2026Article
- Interactive Media Engagement Predicts Posttraumatic Distress After Community Trauma: A National Repeated Cross-Sectional Study.Psychiatry investigation · 2026Article
- How Experience of Online Group Polarization Relates to University Students' Value-Related Judgments and Choices: The Parallel Mediating Roles of Cognitive Dissonance and Emotional Contagion.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Toward an integrated and globally equitable understanding of political polarization.Nature communications · 2026Review
- From Evidence to Engagement: Understanding Online Resistance to Community Water Fluoridation for Public Health Communication-A Qualitative Study.Journal of public health dentistry · 2026Article
- Modeling infodemics on a global scale: A 30 countries study using epidemiological and social listening data.PNAS nexus · 2026Article
- A review of contemporary autonomy: ethics, authority, and the fragility of the late modern subject.Medicine, health care, and philosophy · 2026Review
- Social Media Reactions to Sex Toy Criminalization in Ghana: Cross-Sectional Sentiment and Text Network Analysis.JMIR infodemiology · 2026Article
- Quality assessment of ADHD-related short videos on Chinese social media: A cross-sectional study.Medicine · 2026Article
- Longitudinal predictors of vaccine conspiracy beliefs: findings from a five-wave panel study in Japan.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Intelligent Systems, Vulnerable Minds: A Framework for Radicalization to Violence in the Age of AI.Personality and social psychology review : an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc · 2026Review
- LGBTQ laws and public opinion change.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- The State of Evidence in Digital Hate Research: An Umbrella Review.Communication research · 2026Review
- Does Committing to Green Goals Always Lead to Impactful Action? An Identity-Goal Perspective.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Review
- From Aspiration to Admission: Understanding Pre-Medical Student Perceptions and Decision-Making Processes.The clinical teacher · 2026Article
- Effective graph resistance as cumulative heat dissipation.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Mechanics of pandemics.EClinicalMedicine · 2026Review
261 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors at 4 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Social media may limit the exposure to diverse perspectives and favor the formation of groups of like-minded users framing and reinforcing a shared narrative, that is, echo chambers. However, the interaction paradigms among users and feed algorithms greatly vary across social media platforms. This paper explores the key differences between the main social media platforms and how they are likely to influence information spreading and echo chambers' formation. We perform a comparative analysis of more than 100 million pieces of content concerning several controversial topics (e.g., gun control, vaccination, abortion) from Gab, Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter. We quantify echo chambers over social media by two main ingredients: 1) homophily in the interaction networks and 2) bias in the information diffusion toward like-minded peers. Our results show that the aggregation of users in homophilic clusters dominate online interactions on Facebook and Twitter. We conclude the paper by directly comparing news consumption on Facebook and Reddit, finding higher segregation on Facebook.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.