Retweets Amplify the Echo Chamber Effect

Abstract: The growing prominence of social media in public discourse has led to a greater scrutiny of the quality of online information and the role it plays in amplifying political polarization. However, studies of polarization on social media platforms like Twitter have been hampered by the difficulty of collecting data about the social graph, specifically follow links that shape the echo chambers users join as well as what they see in their timelines. As a proxy of the follower graph, researchers use retweets, although it is not clear how this choice affects analysis. Using a sample of the Twitter follower graph and the tweets posted by users within it, we reconstruct the retweet graph and quantify its impact on the measures of echo chambers and exposure. While we find that echo chambers exist in both graphs, they are more pronounced in the retweet graph. We compare the information users see via their follower and retweet networks to show that retweeted accounts share systematically more polarized content. This bias cannot be explained by the activity or polarization within users' own follower graph neighborhoods but by the increased attention they pay to accounts that are ideologically aligned with their own views. Our results suggest that studies relying on the retweet graphs overestimate the echo chamber effects and exposure to polarized information.