Breaking the Echo Chamber: Social Media Networks and Political Conflict

Menéndez, Luis, Daniel Montolio, Hannes Mueller and Francesco Slataper

No 20559, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

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: Social Networks; Polarization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C45 C55 D74 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-08
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