Measuring the communication between multiple digital political echo chambers: multidimensional Invasiveness, Intrusiveness, and Influence

Until recently, the nature of digital political echo chambers (DPEC) and their interaction with the outside world have relied on guesswork. Recently, three new metrics, Invasiveness, Intrusiveness, and Influence could help with measuring communication between DPECs. Initial efforts have been confined in measuring the communication between two DPECs, which is valuable to understand the political communication dynamics in highly polarized social networks, but fall short of capturing the wider spectrum of the digital public square. We modify those metrics to measure the simultaneous interaction among more than two DPECs. We test those metrics with simulated data as well as real data from the Brazilian Twitter during three days of the Brazilian president Lula’s appeal trial in January 2018 on corruption charges. The findings show that our metrics behave according to their design, and also help with either confirming or challenging some of the extant findings regarding communication among DPECs.