Users polarization on Facebook and Youtube

Abstract

Users online tend to select information that support and adhere their beliefs, and to form polarized groups sharing the same view - e.g. echo chambers. Algorithms for content promotion may favour this phenomenon, by accounting for users preferences and thus limiting the exposure to unsolicited contents. To shade light on this question, we perform a comparative study on how same contents (videos) are consumed on different online social media - i.e. Facebook and YouTube - over a sample of 12M of users. Our findings show that content drives the emergence of echo chambers on both platforms. Moreover, we show that the users' commenting patterns are accurate predictors for the formation of echo-chambers.