Open Facebook and the patterns are unmistakable. It can feel like almost every post that we see mirrors our own preferences. Friends and family sharing photos and stories echoing viewpoints you’ve heard countless times before.
But is it our friends or is it social media that creates an echo chamber? A Michigan State University–led study explores how social media might strengthen or weaken echo chambers — environments where individuals are exposed to people and information that confirm what they already believe. The study focused on social media use and the attitudes of young people who leave rural areas to attend university and the attitudes of their parents who stay behind.
The study, published in Information, Communication and Society, compared 500 undergraduate students who had attended university for different lengths of time and one of their parents (500 student-parent pairs, 1000 total participants).
The study confirmed prior research that has found that one major outcome of attending university is getting to know a larger number of diverse acquaintances and friends, and that this diverse friendship network is related to being more socially tolerant (accepting people who are different from you). This study also found that social media use was generally associated with the same outcomes, knowing people from more diverse backgrounds and being more accepting of those people.
However, students who use the same social media platforms as their parents introduced a more complex relationship. Students who have been at university longer and use the same social media platforms as parents tend to have less diverse networks and lower tolerance. Conversely, parents who are on the same social media platforms as their children had more racially and ethnically diverse networks and had greater tolerance. Their networks exhibited more diversity, while those who did not use shared social media platforms with their children had networks that gradually become less racially and ethnically diverse.
“When young people leave for university, their parents’ networks can become less racially and ethnically diverse — perhaps reflecting the reduced opportunity for contact with children’s friends and social mixing at high school activities. Yet sharing social media platforms with their children appears to partially offset this decline,” said Keith Hampton, professor in the Department of Media and Information in the MSU College of Communication Arts and Sciences and lead author of the study.
The study used egocentric network methods, which focus on an individual’s social relationships and any connections between them. This network approach recognizes that major life events, such as going to university, have a great impact on the makeup of an individual’s network. Residents of rural areas are more likely to know people who share the same backgrounds, beliefs and interests — simply because there are fewer people around from different backgrounds — and this can resemble an echo chamber. For young people from rural areas, the transition to university can be an opportunity to experience greater diversity. The presence of social media may have changed this dynamic, as individuals can more easily maintain past relationships despite the physical distance.
“As interconnected networks grow and influence each other, they can limit or broaden diversity, ultimately shaping attitudes and behaviors,” said Hampton, who is also director of research at the MSU Quello Center, which focuses on the social and economic implications of communication, media and information technologies of the digital age, as well as the policy and management issues raised by these developments.
The researchers focused on students enrolled at one large, public, Midwestern university. These students were selected and identified as rural students based on their ZIP code at the time of application. Students and their parents completed a survey to help the researchers understand their personal network diversity, social media use and social tolerance.
“By examining social media use during the transition to university, we explore how digital platforms can shape connections with diverse individuals and influence the attitudes tied to network diversity,” said Hampton.
These findings suggest that shared social media use during this type of transition allows parents to form new connections and potentially break down echo chambers by having a window into their children’s expanding social circles. This also implies that social media can link lives during major life changes and influence the composition of social networks. This might even mean adding new constraints to the potential for diversity in their children’s networks.
“In the past, when young people left for university, family and friends who stayed in their rural communities saw little change in the diversity of their own networks. But our findings suggest a different story for rural parents who now share social media platforms with their children who leave,” said Hampton.
While the longer-term effects are still unknown, the researchers anticipate the potential for a long-term impact on parents and rural communities.
“We don’t yet know how shared media use shapes other relationships during this transition, but if the effects are similar, the implications for network structures could be far-reaching,” said Hampton. “Our findings suggest that shared social media use during significant life transitions can interrupt established echo chamber dynamics, challenging studies that examine only on-platform interactions that do not take into account how people interact offline and in their communities.”
