Argumentative Essay: Existence of Echo Chambers on Social Media

Question :

An argumentative essay:

Do you believe echo chambers exist on social media, where people tend to become “insulated from contrary perspectives”? Discuss and illustrate with real-life examples.

Answer :

Argumentative Essay: Existence of Echo Chambers on Social Media

Social media has played a very significant role in changing the pattern of communication. It is a platform where millions of people communicate and exchange their opinions, thoughts, and ideas with others. Social media has become an essential source of information and people believe what they see on social media. It has made possible for the people to spread fake news. It has been found that there is a socially contagious phenomenon that is affecting the way of things of the individual with the increasingly widespread as well as influential use of social media (Garimella et al., 2018). It advocates the existence of echo chambers on social media and hence, it is believed that echo chambers exist on social media. 

Social media has a significant impact on the thinking pattern of the people and their perspectives are being changed due to modified or metaphorical description of a situation. People have access to a certain type of information with the help of social media. They have access to information and news even at the political level. It has been also found that due to political gain, political parties run a campaign to affect the thinking pattern of people. They spread false information for their personal gain that significantly influences the way people think. A certain type of information has penetrated the mind of people that lead them to support the concerned political party and make them successful in the election.

 With the help of social media, people participate in an online debate where they find a similar way of thinking, opinion, ideas, and thoughts expressed, repeated, and supported, again and again, that makes their convictions stronger. It has also been found that people read only such information that strengthens as well as confirm their opinions. This is called the echo chamber (Quattrociocchi et al., 2016). Thus, it also advocates that the echo chamber exists on social media.

Information and news are being used in a favorable way to affect the mindset of the people to support the policies of the government with the help of social media. For example, there are different views on immigration policies of the President of America Donald Trump. Some of the people supported the policies while some of the people believe that the policies are not good. But a wide range of false information was provided on social media to support the immigration policies of President Donald Trump by affecting the people of thinking patterns.

Echo champers without cutting their members from the line of communication to the world isolate them. They focus mainly on affecting the mindset of the people to believe in what is being intended to portray and social media helps in achieving such goals. A sense of trust is created using twisted and modified information for the same purpose to trigger the opinions, ideas, and thoughts of people (Hundt et al., 2017). Hence, it can be said that echo chambers exist on social media. 

References 

Garimella, K., De Francisci Morales, G., Gionis, A., & Mathioudakis, M. (2018, April). Political discourse on social media: Echo chambers, gatekeepers, and the price of bipartisanship. In Proceedings of the 2018 World Wide Web Conference (pp. 913-922).

Hundt, M., Schneider, B., El-Assady, M., Keim, D. A., & Diehl, A. (2017). Visual analysis of geolocated echo chambers in social media. In EuroVis 2017 Eurographics/IEEE VGTC Conference on Visualization 2017 (pp. 125-128).

Quattrociocchi, W., Scala, A., & Sunstein, C. R. (2016). Echo chambers on Facebook. Available at SSRN 2795110.