On Monday, May 15, writer and translator Nikos Sarantakos launched an online vote on his personal blog, asking his readers to guess the outcome of the election. “Perhaps because the blog has a slightly more non-religious audience, the first responses put New Democracy ahead by a small margin of 2% or 3%.” When Mr. Sarandakos decided to move his e-canter to Facebook and Twitter, where he often wages fierce online battles in favor of SYRIZA, the picture gradually began to change. “I won’t tell you too much, until Friday night, when the vote ended, SYRIZA was in the lead.”

The “echo chamber” phenomenon is not unprecedented in Greek political matters. In the summer of 2015, we saw the opposite happen, with the “Yes” supporters in the referendum falling from the clouds not so much because of the defeat itself, but because of its magnitude. Inextricably linked to the explosive growth of social media influence over the past decade, the echo chamber refers metaphorically to the amplification of ideas, beliefs, and information when they are repeated in a closed system of like-minded people, where different opinions are censored, discarded. or they are not presented with the same frequency. So if the people who follow Mr. Nikos Saradakos make up a very large percentage of SYRIZA voters, it is more than expected that their online poll will show the party they support as the eventual winner.

But they were not the only ones who were “misled” by the elections. Since most of us (or at least those of us who use social networks) have witnessed an unprecedented anti-premier (characteristically overtly toxic and pedantic) communicator for four years, we at some point believed that the place of the saint boiled there. hatred and resentment against Kyriakos Mitsotakis. This was another reason why some of us were quite skeptical of the more pro-government opinion polls. Certain conditions were also created regarding the electoral behavior of young people, which could denigrate the New Democracy. As you know, none of this was confirmed during the voting. Therefore, it is possible that the microcosm of social media has misled even the SYRIZA leadership group itself and lured them into an electoral strategy that seems to be based on a rather distorted perception of reality.

“in a cage”

“If you look at the entire SYRIZA campaign, it’s purely aimed at the Twitter audience,” he said. the vice president of ND tells me. Adonis Georgiades, known for its abundant presence in the arena of the most hostile environment. “This does not mean that at New Democracy we take what happens on Twitter or Facebook seriously, alas. On the contrary, SYRIZA seems to have completely locked itself into the echo chamber phenomenon, meaning one person only listened to what the other said, causing them to believe that this is also reality.”

It is true that SYRIZA deliberately invested in the election campaign in the social media advocates of Mitsotaki’s opponents, with the exception of the overly mischievous and informal commissar Pavlos Polakis. Elena Akrita was without a doubt the star of this online avant-garde, even coming in second in the state voting. Evangelos Antonaros, who made a second career on Twitter as an anti-Mitsotaki commentator, appears to have been selected on the same criteria; the fact that he was not elected in the East Attica region under his new political umbrella says more about SYRIZA. who took it to the partisans, not for himself.

Ideas, beliefs and information are reinforced when they are repeated in a closed system of interaction between people with the same or similar ideas.

“I got a lesson”

Conversation with Elena Akrita, I understand from the very beginning that the topic concerns her. “You know,” he tells me very politely, “when you have 270,000 followers on Facebook, both the number and your interactions with those people can be misleading. Obviously there is an echo chamber syndrome and it is possible that I also stepped on it. I’ll tell you what: when you made a post half an hour ago that got ten thousand likes in a few minutes, and before you even left the house, people caught you on the street and said: “Miss Akrita, how right you are.” “, you are unconsciously reducing a reality that, as most recent experience has shown, has a serious chance of being wrong. And since I am a person who loves self-criticism, I have no problem admitting that what we experienced last Sunday was a big lesson, an unpleasant , a hard, painful lesson, of course, but a lesson anyway. So we have to come out of our shell, at least that’s what I tell myself.” So should we expect another Elena Akrita from now on, at least in terms of her online persona? “Yes, to some extent. I decided to make selective appearances on television, a medium that, as you know, I excluded. So is she thinking about shrinking her digital presence, I ask her. “I don’t say that. And my digital presence is not limited to the central political scene. Just recently I wrote about a “child” who tortured seven puppies to death, unimaginable things “…

Associate Professor of the Department of Sociology of Communication AUTH Vassilis Vamvakass argues that social networks are not the only resonator in SYRIZA that cuts him off from reality. “Historically, the party is associated with a wide and important part of the intellectuals who instill in the party not only a sense of intellectual/cultural superiority, but also the impression of privileged access to “explored” knowledge. Except that this knowledge concerns either an imaginary reality or a completely outdated reality, which is viewed through the glasses of an almost theocratic theoretical approach.

Manolis Andriotakis is a technologist, journalist and writer. it reminds us that social media is not a tool for dialogue, but a tool for persuasion. “It is useless to explore social or political trends through the content of the networks, because the networks circulate mostly one-sided and tendentious material. If there were real debates, more reliable conclusions could be drawn. Under the current regime, social media is not a distorting mirror, but a “chaos machine,” as journalist Max Fischer describes it. The algorithm works to keep this process going as people interact and train it to make them even more biased towards others. The environment reinforces extremism and extreme polarization. Anyone who bases any study on data derived from social media content risks not only getting a distorted picture of society, but also believing that all people in the 21st century have become narcissists and bigots. Social media in its current form is a fenced-in space that encourages certain behaviors, an experiment whose only good for democracy at the moment is that it provides a good valve to reset accumulated individual impasses.”

Book curator and historian Stratis Mournazos (leader of excellent Avgi Inserts until 2016 when all editorial left due to serious political differences with the then SYRIZA-ANEL government) tells me that he cannot know if the social media bubble affected his SYRIZA campaign, ” but I know it has drastically affected the image and expectations of many of us.” A critical distinction is needed here, he points out. “Poems with the refrain ‘ts… Mitsotakis’ (as well as the blue ‘pizzas’ in June 2019) can approach the tavern – the group will probably say so, and not about the Hegelian philosophy of the state. But when they turn into a way political appeal, they become pernicious. That’s also the key to Facebook and the distortions it produces. It’s two in one: a street cafe and a public space for politics (or at least pretending to be. I’m not advocating slicked-back, sterile politics. As Gina Politi said , who said goodbye to us on Wednesday, “the speech of the left should be the speech of passion, passion, but not anger.” From there, to mocking “Culis” or demonizing “Alexis” is a huge distance. So what does he propose? How can we protect ourselves? “Let’s let’s save the good things from the “bubble”: warmth, moments, fun, stories, pleasant thoughts – not in order to stay, but to get out of it. And an irresistible weapon everywhere and always, as a mental and mental exercise, remains to put oneself in a position ” adversary.”

Antipas Karipoglu totally disagrees, a lawyer, with an active social media presence and an active political activist in the recent past. In fact, he thinks we’ve overestimated the echo chamber phenomenon. “First, even outside of social media, we find ourselves in echo chambers every day. We do not select our companies based on selective survey criteria. It’s natural when I see more lawyers than plumbers at work, for example, so I hear more about issues that interest lawyers than plumbers. It remains for a person to be able to think that the problems of lawyers are not the most serious thing that worries society, because he hears more about them, and for this, I think, a lot of mind is not needed. So I don’t do anything special to “protect myself”. I just know that my social media circle is not a representative sample. And I don’t want them to be like that; I use social media to have fun, see things that interest me, say what I want to say, and connect with people I like.”