Breaking the Echo Chamber: Social Media Networks and Political Conflict

Luis Menéndez, Daniel Montolio, Hannes Mueller and Francesco Slataper

No 1505, Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics

Abstract: This article exploits data from a political conflict between language groups to show how political events can rapidly redefine how these groups interact on social media. Leveraging on a unique dataset of 26 million retweets by 120 000 Catalan- and Spanish- speaking Twitter users, we estimate individual exposure to tweets with a network-based model. We then compare two shocks in the same region and year: the Barcelona terror attack and the Catalan independence referendum of 2017. The referendum, and related police violence, triggered a sharp, symmetric jump in retweeting across language groups. The terror attack, by contrast, did not lead to a similar realignment.

Keywords: polarization; social networks; political conflict; social media; echo-chambers; retweet behavior; ethno-linguistic conflict (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C45 C55 D74 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big, nep-inv, nep-net and nep-soc
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