Abstract
The contemporary debate about the place and role of political digital echo chambers (DPECs) in political communication relies more on assumptions, guess work, and speculations rather than empirical conclusions. Such shortcomings reflect the lack of empirical tools to measure the communication between echo chambers and the outside world. We try to overcome this deficiency by construing three graph-level metrics: Invasiveness, Intrusiveness and Influence, which try to capture the information dominance of a DPEC over another one, its strength of information source, and the penetration capability of one DPEC’s message into another DPEC’s space. We tested our metrics with simulated and real network data, and they seem to respond according to their design and our expectations. Test results on real network data showed that our metrics would be very useful in measuring the comparative strength of political mobilization in face of opposing forces that use the same social networks for political countermobilization.
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Acknowledgements
We presented initial highlights of this research at the 9th UBT Annual International Conference, October 30–31, 2020. We are grateful to panel member Artan Mustafa who commented and offered suggestions on our presentation. Also, we presented a further improved version of the original paper in the COST meeting organized by University of Namur, Belgium, 18−20 May 2022. We are indebted to José Fernando Mendes for his comments as well as encouragement to publish it. This article builds on the Master Thesis submitted by Ridvan Peshkopia as a requirement for receiving the Master of Science degree with the Department of Applied Mathematics of the University of Tirana, Albania, under the supervision of Eglantina Kalluçi. We thank the committee members, Fatmir Hoxha and Eva Noka for their comments and suggestions. Also, Frederik Dara offered support and suggestions to improve our work. Last but not least, we are infinitesimally grateful to Raquel Recuero, who offered us the data from the Brazilian Tweeter. Comments and suggestions from the reviewers of Social Network Analysis and Mining were extremely helpful to improve our work. Any errors and misconceptions remain the authors.
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Ridvan Peshkopia localized the problem, conceptualized the metrics, interpreted the findings on real data, and wrote the manuscript. Eglantina Kalluçi mathematically formalized the metrics, as well as tested them on simulated and real data, thus building all the tables and figures of the manuscript. Both authors reviewed the manuscript along the lines of their original contributions.
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Appendix A
Appendix A
Below are the MATLAB codes applied for the simulated and Twitter data of the paper “Invasiveness, Intrusiveness and Influence: Three new metrics to measure communication between political digital echo chambers.”
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Kalluçi, E., Peshkopia, R. Invasiveness, Intrusiveness and Influence: three new metrics to measure communication between political digital echo chambers. Soc. Netw. Anal. Min. 14, 31 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-023-01186-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-023-01186-6