Characterizing the Fragmentation of the Social Media Ecosystem

The entertainment-driven dynamics of social media platforms encourage users to engage with like-minded individuals and consume content aligned with their beliefs. These dynamics may amplify polarization by reinforcing shared perspectives and reducing exposure to diverse viewpoints. Simultaneously, users migrate from one platform to another, either forced by moderation policies, such as de-platforming, or spontaneously seeking environments more aligned with their preferences. These migrations foster the specialization and differentiation of the social media ecosystem, with platforms increasingly organized around specific user communities and shared content preferences. This shift marks an evolution from echo chambers enclosed within platforms to "echo platforms", i.e., entire platforms functioning as ideologically homogeneous niches. This study introduces an operational framework to systematically analyze these dynamics, by examining three key dimensions: platform centrality (central vs. peripheral), news consumption (reliable vs questionable), and user base composition (uniform vs diverse). To this aim, we leverage a dataset of 126M URLs posted by nearly 6M users on nine social media platforms, namely Facebook, Reddit, Twitter (now X), YouTube, BitChute, Gab, Parler, Scored, and Voat. We find a clear separation between mainstream and alt-tech platforms, with the second category being characterized by a peripheral role in the social media ecosystem, a greater prevalence of unreliable content, and a heightened ideological uniformity. These findings outline the main dimensions defining the fragmentation and polarization of the social media ecosystem.