Political echo chambers on Belgian Facebook pages

From the idealized Habermasian public sphere to the criticized "echo chambers": online public forums are often described as spaces where a potential democratic ideal can unfold. In this research we mobilise data scraped from the social networking site Facebook to construct two interlinked data-sets, in order to investigate the political diversity of online discussions before the 2014 federal Belgianelection. At first, a bipartite network made of 800 pages from the political parties and its users is constructed. Then, by means of theLouvain community detection algorithm, users’ political orient... Mehr ...