What's in your PIE? Understanding the contents of personalized information environments with PIEGraph

Abstract

Social media have long been studied from platform-centric perspectives, which entail sampling messages based on criteria such as keywords and specific accounts. In contrast, user-centric approaches attempt to reconstruct the personalized information environments users create for themselves. Most user-centric studies analyze what users have accessed directly through browsers (e.g., through clicks) rather than what they may have seen in their social media feeds. This study introduces a data collection system of our own design called PIEGraph that links survey data with posts collected from participants' personalized X (formerly known as Twitter) timelines. Thus, in contrast with previous research, our data include much more than what users decide to click on. We measure the total amount of data in our participants' respective feeds and conduct descriptive and inferential analyses of three other quantities of interest: political content, ideological skew, and fact quality ratings. Our results are relevant to ongoing debates about digital echo chambers, misinformation, and conspiracy theories; and our general methodological approach could be applied to social media beyond X/Twitter contingent on data availability.