07/02/17 - Twitter accounts really are echo chambers, study finds (44)

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/04/twitter-accounts-really-are-echo-chambers-study-finds

This article firstly started to talk about how politics and the internet are very similar with each other. It then carried on saying that a research carried out by Twitter users from parties such as Labour are tend to interact with each other more than the other different political parties. In addition, it started to talk about how on Twitter, different types of supporters would act differently on the social media sites, even by the things they may upload on their Twitter profile picture, said by a cognitive scientist at Sheffield University, Tom Stafford. It also showed a table under the headline 'Political user groups were found to re-tweet users who belong to their own group more frequently than those belonging to others'. So overall, this article manly was talking about the way in which all of these politicians use social media accounts, according to different types of research taken into account.

• More than three-quarters of retweets from SNP supporters and 73% of those from Ukip supporters were of someone from their own party. In contrast, the highest proportion of one party retweeting supporters of another – 32% – was between Tories and Ukip supporters.
• Labour supporters were weighted more heavily towards the Guardian, Independent, New Statesman, Mirror and Huffington Post, all of which Demos classes as centre-left or leftwing, and perhaps unsurprisingly accounted for 82% of shares from LabourList.
• The research was carried out by the thinktank Demos, which looked at the tweets sent between May and August last year by 2,000 people who have publicly stated their political allegiance on their profiles and who had at some point addressed a member of parliament in their tweets.

In my opinion, I really find this very interesting in terms of finding out how the people, we would hardly expect to use social media sites, use them. However, linking back to the title of this article, I disagree with it since I believe that they are not an echo chamber, to some extent. Echo chambers are defined as uncensored etc, but I believe that these politicians do like to try and hide some important information and keep it private and within the party itself.