Echo chamber
Anupam kumar Singh, MD
20 March 2018
As a follow up to my initial analysis of digital media outlets where i found that, Right of centre media outlets like OpIndia and Swarajya generated more activity on twitter and facebook than scroll and wire. My next set of inquiry came from a question i was posed post that analysis- But wire and Scroll appear to have larger follower counts. So how do we measure influence then?
Now follower counts dont interest me much , even KRK had higher follower count before he was ousted by twitter.And influence metrices are a lot more complicated. My objectives in this post will be to :
- to look for overlap between followers of these digital outlets(opindia,swarajya,wire,scroll,altnews)
- to look for overlap between followers of these digital outlets and right(rahulroushan) and left leaning personalities(free_thinker)
- To compare follower location of two extreme parody handles(unofficialsuswamy and padha likha)
- To see if there was bot like behaviour in followers i.e. followers were created suddenly
Data Extraction.
I extracted followers of all these media outlets and personalities from twitter REST API. I performed a look up on user id of followers again using REST API. THe data (30 MB csv file) containing 8.6 lakh user id of followers of rspective outlets can be found here
My hypothesis was-most of the followers would gravitate towards one or more wings. Example I have right of centre ideology. I followed Swarajya and opIndia from start briefly subscribed to scroll and wire but then unfollowed. Currently inmy echo-chamber i get link to some articles on these media outlets if i they are shared by fellow mostly right-wingers on my timeline(that is rare). But due to my background in medicine and health, i tend to get exposed to these articles by some health journalists who i follow, who subscribe mostly to left of centre ideology and almost never share right wing stories.
My hypothesis that cyberbalkanization and polarization on twitter is strong so i wanted to check out the hypothesis.
Overlap between outlets.
Let’s look at absolute counts first
| account | n |
|---|---|
| wire | 265006 |
| scroll | 169411 |
| opindia | 64659 |
| swarajya | 59854 |
| We clearly | see that Wire and Scroll have higher follower count than OpIndia and Swarajya though lower activity and engagement as we have seen previously. |
Lets look at raw number of overlaps and unique followers.
## # A tibble: 15 x 5
## # Groups: opindia, swarajya, scroll, wire [15]
## opindia swarajya scroll wire n
## <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <int>
## 1 0. 0. 0. 1. 177735
## 2 0. 0. 1. 0. 83085
## 3 0. 0. 1. 1. 71899
## 4 1. 0. 0. 0. 33162
## 5 0. 1. 0. 0. 26148
## 6 1. 1. 0. 0. 19573
## 7 0. 1. 1. 1. 3922
## 8 1. 1. 1. 1. 3866
## 9 1. 0. 1. 1. 2452
## 10 0. 1. 0. 1. 2086
## 11 1. 0. 0. 1. 1694
## 12 0. 1. 1. 0. 1626
## 13 1. 1. 0. 1. 1352
## 14 1. 1. 1. 0. 1281
## 15 1. 0. 1. 0. 1279We see that wire and scroll have largest unique followers as well. However the interesting fact is that overlap in their numbers exceeds followers of opindia and swarajya. We also find that true news junkies who follow at least 3/4 ouets is only 78000 out of 5.5 lakh followers meaning only around 1.4% of people are true news junkies
Rest are partisans like me and am not alone..:-)
Lets visualise it in Venn diagram
Lets see it with scroll
Lets visualise all four together
so it confirms our inuition about echo chambers and the fact that liberals despite being called liberlas like to live in echo chambers as much as right of centre people like me do.
Lets see intersection plot for richer detail
Handle analysis
We bring two more personalities in analysis - rahulroushan who is my favorite satirist and founder of fake news and pratik sinha on handle free_thinker who ran truth of gujrat and was elevated by left wing websites and media camps.
| padhalikha | wire | opindia | rahulroushan | pratik_sinha | altnews | n |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 220288 |
| 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 54711 |
| 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 26013 |
| 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 15102 |
| 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 14431 |
| 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 14261 |
| 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 11023 |
| 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 9889 |
| 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 8956 |
| 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 8727 |
| 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 7896 |
| 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 5969 |
| 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 5025 |
| 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 4802 |
| 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 3013 |
Lets look at venn diagram
We see clear cut split and marking of boundaries.
parody sites
Lets analyse followers of satires handles lile padhalikha and unoffical suswamy.
Lets analyse the followers of padhalikha and suswamy
padhalikha handle first
| location | n |
|---|---|
| 9971 | |
| India | 2250 |
| New Delhi, India | 809 |
| Mumbai, India | 693 |
| Mumbai | 571 |
| Bengaluru, India | 539 |
| Bangalore | 483 |
| New Delhi | 390 |
| Pune, India | 308 |
| Hyderabad, India | 227 |
| Delhi | 215 |
| Pune | 174 |
| Kolkata, India | 153 |
| india | 152 |
| Chennai, India | 143 |
| Chennai | 139 |
| Gurgaon, India | 115 |
| Hyderabad | 114 |
| Bharat | 106 |
| Bengaluru | 100 |
We seee while almost 30% handles have no location ID. Due to people putting different names same location has been mentioned differently .
Rest of handles are from vatious cities. It appears Bengaluru n mumbai overtake Delhi as far as follower count of padhalikha is cocerned.
Coming to suswamy handle
| location | n |
|---|---|
| 3820 | |
| India | 826 |
| New Delhi, India | 413 |
| Mumbai, India | 276 |
| Bengaluru, India | 219 |
| Mumbai | 197 |
| Bangalore | 158 |
| New Delhi | 157 |
| Hyderabad, India | 135 |
| Chennai, India | 105 |
| Pune, India | 98 |
| Chennai | 81 |
| Kolkata, India | 78 |
| Delhi | 67 |
| india | 62 |
| Dubai, United Arab Emirates | 60 |
| Hyderabad | 46 |
| Lucknow, India | 44 |
| Delhi, India | 43 |
| Bengaluru South, India | 42 |
Out of 13000 followers of suswamy , we see again the regular pattern..however many of handles are from dubai(116)(combining various versions of nameof Dubai ), pakistan(20),doha,riyadh and 6 followers from “India occupied Kashmir” (as claimed by the followers) as well..Quite an eclectic slection!
## # A tibble: 20 x 2
## screen_name location
## <chr> <chr>
## 1 MAMPMP Dubai, UAE
## 2 princegdr Dubai,United Arab Emirates.
## 3 sajin02 Dubai
## 4 JinsonAickara Dubai
## 5 tweet2el Dubai, United Arab Emirates
## 6 rashid_dubai Dubai
## 7 nethussain Dubai, United Arab Emirates
## 8 jerinjoy83 Dubai, United Arab Emirates
## 9 MohsinMail Dubai, United Arab Emirates
## 10 Vivekkanadan United Arab Emirates,Dubai
## 11 rizvi_ahmad Dubai
## 12 MalikImrank Dubai, United Arab Emirates
## 13 Nurshaun "Dubai "
## 14 syedzaheer2002 Dubai -United Arab Emirates
## 15 aparajithan_v Dubai, United Arab Emirates
## 16 mannusingh13 Dubai, United Arab Emirates
## 17 iamsamun Dubai, United Arab Emirates
## 18 satyatwit Dubai
## 19 asif_shafi Dubai
## 20 jsrfaisalusmani Dubai## # A tibble: 6 x 2
## screen_name location
## <chr> <chr>
## 1 MirUzair1 Indian Occupied Kashmir
## 2 darjavaid100 Indian Occupied Kashmir
## 3 aasafali Kashmir, Indian Occupied
## 4 KASHMIRcentric Indian Occupied Kashmir
## 5 kashmir_24 Indian Occupied Kashmir
## 6 AbuHamz69346504 "Indian Occupied Kashmir "| screen_name | location |
|---|---|
| MuhammadMonis1 | Pakistan |
| IjazUqaab | Pakistan |
| InziGujjar | Punjab, Pakistan |
| Misbah_556 | Peshawar, Pakistan |
| mhaiderimtiaz | Islamabad, Pakistan |
| Zameer_Hussain_ | Pakistan |
| Rizu_xheikh | Rawalpindi, Pakistan |
| almostsomeone | Quetta, Pakistan |
| panhwar_ahsan | Karachi, Pakistan |
| zaid_punjabi | Pakistan |
| KhanMavrik | Pakistan |
| adeel_azhar | Pakistan |
| jamali_qudoos | Sindh, Pakistan |
| urooh37 | North-west Frontier, Pakistan |
| carcosa12 | Pakistan |
| KashifNadeem | Pakistan, The Netherlands |
| Waqaas1 | Karachi, Pakistan |
| faysalmalyk1 | Karachi, Pakistan |
| mesohhail | Karachi, Pakistan |
| haris_khurshid | Islamabad, Pakistan |
Six ardent followers from kashmir or “India Occupied kashmir”(as claimed by their profiles) and 20 from pakistan as well .
while padhalikha has also 3 or 4 followers from dubai and there are two from kashmir.clearly suswamy has more admireres from mid-east region.
While indeed nobody is responsible for who follows them..the follower list gives an idea about view points they espouse.
Lets look at timelines when their followers joined to detect if bots are following them.
Analysing padhalikha handle first- 
so padhalikha handle seems to have many followers who joined twitter early.
In case of Suswamy- 
In Comparison suswamy handle has many followers which joined late.
Neither padhalikha or suswamy handle shows bot like behaviour or sudden creation of followers.
Key Takeways
- Indian twitter is an echo chamber . only 1.4% of followers follow outlets of competing ideologies.
- Satirists followers also have distinct geographical predilection .
- Left Wing outlets have higher follower count but lesser activiity. wire has the highest follower count.