Intentional echo chamber management: Chinese celebrity fans’ information-seeking and sense-making practices on social media

Purpose This paper aims to investigate how Chinese celebrity fans seek and make sense of information oriented toward their interpretations of celebrities while deliberately forming and managing their own echo chambers. These activities provide insights into how contemporary people can obtain information online not to gain knowledge but only to reinforce beliefs and how echo chambers can be shaped not only by the human subconscious and online algorithms but also by intentionality and mastery of platform functions. Design/methodology/approach This study uses unobtrusive observation and semi-structured interviews to investigate the information practices among a social media-based fan community surrounding two Chinese musical actors, Ayanga and Yunlong. Findings Fans selectively process sought information to match their predetermined interpretations while intentionally following like-minded people and blocking differing views. As fans themselves acknowledge this practice of forming and managing echo chambers, they ground their subjectivity in compartmentalization of fantasy and reality: defining fandom as playful, imaginary and existing only in their own minds, fans accept only information that reinforces their interpretations, yet when “serious” matters occur in celebrities’ realities, fans break out of their chambers to seek alternative information sources and form less biased perceptions. Originality/value The celebrity fan practices examined in this study indicate that, nowadays, people have evolved from intuitively and inductively acquiring information to actively dictating what information they interact with on social media, using echo chamber management as one way to assert this agency.