(Inside Science) — The picture at the top of this story is not a blurry image of two colliding galaxies or a splitting cell viewed through a microscope. It is a snapshot of today’s divided America.
On the left is a blob representing Twitter’s liberal echo chamber, and on the right, a blob for the conservative one. The brightness of the blob represents the concentration of tweets that echo other tweets with similar opinions. The researchers who generated the plot described their method in a paper published in Physical Review Letters in January.
Echoes and Filters
You may have heard of the terms “echo chamber” and “filter bubble.” While they are sometimes used interchangeably, they mainly refer to two different features in online discussions. The term echo chamber describes a phenomenon where people tend to interact with those whose opinions are similar to their own, and filter bubble describes the phenomenon of people not interacting with opinions different from their own.
