Unveiling the drivers of active participation in social media discourse.

ABSTRACT: The emergence of new public forums in the form of online social media has introduced unprecedented challenges to public discourse, including polarization, misinformation, and the rise of echo chambers. Existing research has extensively examined these topics by focusing on the active actions performed by users, without accounting for the share of individuals who consume content without actively interacting with it. In contrast, this study incorporates passive consumption data to investigate the prevalence of active participation in online discourse. We introduce a metric to quantify the share of active engagement and analyze over 17 million pieces of content linked to a polarized Twitter debate to understand its relationship with several features of online environments, such as echo chamber

SUBMITTER: Baqir A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11810998 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature