‘Echo Chambers’: Partisan Facebook Groups during the 2014 Thai Election

Abstract

Do social networking sites (SNS) such as Facebook enhance deliberation in a democratic public sphere, or do they act as echo chambers, in which like-minded individuals reinforce their previously held beliefs? This article descriptively assesses this puzzle within a case study of Facebook posts on the 2014 Thai general election. Two very different realities emerge from the content analysis of several partisan Facebook pages. The ‘echo chamber’ hypothesis is further supported through network visualization and analysis of the interaction patterns between users of these Facebook pages. While users in the ‘same side’ of the political divide frequently comment, share and like content posted by like-minded pages and individuals, interactions across the ideological divide are negligible. Selective exposure seems to be at work, leading to a situation in which partisan social media users hardly engage with discrepant information or views at all.