We Were Wrong about Echo Chambers

The concept is more complex than we thought

I am working on a video at the moment about why the internet seems to make us hate one another, and why it seems near-impossible to have sensible disagreements online. Part of this has been looking at the literature around echo chambers - whether they exist, what they are, and what they do. And I recently came across a paper by C. Thi Nguyen on this very topic that was absolutely fantastic, and completely changed the way I see the topic, so I would like to chat about it for a bit here.

Like many people, I had conceived of an echo chamber as a sort of information silo. A place where someone does not encounter ideas beyond a set of pre-approved ones. Take someone I once met who grew up in a highly religious community. He did not encounter arguments against the existence of God until he was an adult. But Nguyen thinks echo chambers are far more complicated than this, and after reading his paper, I agree.