Invasiveness, Intrusiveness and Influence: three new metrics to measure communication between political digital echo chambers

The contemporary debate about the place and role of political digital echo chambers (DPECs) in political communication relies more on assumptions, guess work, and speculations rather than empirical conclusions. Such shortcomings reflect the lack of empirical tools to measure the communication between echo chambers and the outside world. We try to overcome this deficiency by construing three graph-level metrics: Invasiveness, Intrusiveness and Influence, which try to capture the information dominance of a DPEC over another one, its strength of information source, and the penetration capability of one DPEC’s message into another DPEC’s space. We tested our metrics with simulated and real network data, and they seem to respond according to their design and our expectations. Test results on real network data showed that our metrics would be very useful in measuring the comparative strength of political mobilization in face of opposing forces that use the same social networks for political countermobilization.