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Are there any information bubbles in the presidential campaign?

During the American elections, there was a lot of talk about information bubbles. Social networks are said to lock us into information communities into which we gradually fall. So it was very interesting to do the exercise on Twitter, the social network where, by definition, you can follow anyone, and where there is no timeline algorithm. Analysis via Visibrain.

I. 10 million tweets mapped

The first step was to extract more than 10m tweets about the presidential election. I then mapped all the interactions. The bigger a point, the more it was mentioned by other players. Each colour represents a community according to a clustering algorithm. In reality, the main camps can be found in the interactions. This shows de facto that we are in the same situation as on Facebook: we are interacting with our denominational bubble on a political level.

At the same time, I carried out the same exercise for 500,000 tweets about the presidential election (one week's worth of tweets, taken between 7 and 15 April), but this time I observed interactions not between Twitter accounts and Twitter accounts, but between accounts and domain names:

Here again, each campaigner for each candidate is locking himself into information bubbles. In filtered form, it looks like this:

As this is very general, we'll look at the main domain names in information bubbles.

Sources of information by candidate

To filter communities, I used the communities of the 10 million tweets. For each candidate, I took the 1,000 most active activists within the community, which provides a table of domains via Visibrain (over the last two months). Secondly, the map shows the zoom on the part of the domain interaction map that is specific to the community. (So it's not the same data that's shown).

1. Le Pen

Le Pen's sources are very close to those of the Fillon clan, but on much more conspiracy-oriented sites. The top 3 are:

Boulevard Voltaire
FrDeSouche
Le Figaro

The map shows the presence of Sputnik, égalité et réconciliation and other sites that are the perfect conspiracy kit.

2.Fillon

Quite close to Marine Le Pen, François Fillon's communities consult first :

Le Figaro
Valeurs Actuelles
L'Opinion

3. Macron

Macron is more consultative:

Le Figaro
Le Monde
Libération

The map shows an acquittance for Challenge magazine.

4. Melenchon

Mélenchon's communities share more:

Le Monde
L'Huffington Post
FranceTvInfo

The map shows YouTube in particular, the spearhead of Mélenchon's communication. We can also see the Discord channel, a popular platform for gamers.

5. Hamon

Hamon activists share more information from :

Libération
Canal +
Le Monde

They are also more open to the outside world. Le Soir and RTS are among them.

Conclusions

Yes, we have information bubbles. And no, it's not an algorithm that sets them for us. We consciously jump into them. This little analysis of Twitter makes this fairly easy to establish. However, we need to be cautious insofar as most of the people expressing their views on the presidential election in the press are activists and are therefore more likely to knowingly enclose themselves in bubbles. Everyone quotes the main media. However, it is frightening to see the information bubble formed by Fillon and Le Pen, who are moving away from the traditional media and relaying sites that can be described as conspiracy sites.