Week 6: Network Isolation

Hello everyone, and welcome back to my blog! This week, I analyzed network isolation across both Reddit and X communities. Network isolation measures how internally connected a community is compared to how much it connects with other communities. A higher isolation score means that most of the connections are within one community, which means there is a higher chance of the community being an echo chamber.

How it was calculated

To calculate network isolation, I used the graph structures I showed in my Week 3 blog to visualize the connections between communities. However, those graphs don’t show all the connections within the community, so I used a separate graph structure where each node was individual comments. 

For each community, I calculated the number of edges that were inside one community versus the edges that connected to other communities. The equation I used to calculate the isolation score was:

Isolation = 1 – (external edges/total edges)

A score closer to 1 means that the community is more isolated, while a score closer to 0 means the community is quite connected to other communities.

Reddit Communities

Donald Trump Policies: 0.819634

Tax Policy: 0.780711

Economic Inequality: 0.748477

Healthcare Policy: 0.743123

Private Prisons: 0.733083

Abortion Access: 0.726770

Iran Sanctions: 0.718178

Religious Freedom: 0.685297

Middle East Policy: 0.660290

These results show that Reddit communities are well split into clusters. The highest isolation score is Donald Trump Policies with a score of 0.819634, meaning this community has the highest chance of being an echo chamber out of all the Reddit communities. Other communities like Tax Policy and Economic Inequality also had high isolation scores, meaning these communities also tend to act more like echo chambers. Even the lowest score from Middle East Policy at 0.660290, is still above 0.5, meaning that there are limited connections between that community and others. 

X Communities

Political Campaigns and Elections: 0.911257

International Relations and Strategy: 0.910421

Media, Communication, and Public Discourse: 0.906196

National Security and Defense: 0.863192

Education and Teaching: 0.836330

Social Issues and Race Relations: 0.814220

Research and Scientific Development: 0.813017

Economic Policy and Finance: 0.782751

These scores show that communities on X are extremely isolated, with many of the scores being above 0.9. Political Campaigns and Elections and International Relations and Strategy both have scores above 0.91, meaning that many of the connections in these communities are internal. Media, Communication, and Public Discourse are closely behind, meaning that a lot of communication are very contained in specific groups. Even the lowest-scoring community, Economic Policy and Finance at 0.782751, has a high score. Overall, communities on X tend to be more isolated than those on Reddit.

Overall, communities on both Reddit and X are very isolated, but X showed higher isolation scores compared to Reddit, meaning echo chambers on that platform may be stronger. 

In the following weeks, I will calculate the final results for the Echo Chamber Indices for all communities across both platforms, and I will be looking at what kind of metrics influence echo chambers on both platforms. 

Thank you for reading, and I will see you all next week!

Harish