Breaking the Echo Chamber: Social Media Networks and Political Conflict

• Authors: Francesco Slataper, Luis Menéndez, Daniel Montolio and Hannes Mueller.
• BSE Working Paper: 1505 | September 25
• Keywords: polarization , social networks , political conflict , social media , echo-chambers , retweet behavior , ethno-linguistic conflict
• JEL codes: D74, C55, C45

This article exploits data from a political conflict between language groups to show how political events can rapidly redefine how these groups interact on social media. Leveraging on a unique dataset of 26 million retweets by 120 000 Catalan- and Spanish- speaking Twitter users, we estimate individual exposure to tweets with a network-based model. We then compare two shocks in the same region and year: the Barcelona terror attack and the Catalan independence referendum of 2017. The referendum, and related police violence, triggered a sharp, symmetric jump in retweeting across language groups. The terror attack, by contrast, did not lead to a similar realignment.