(Almost) Everything in Moderation: New Evidence on Americans' Online Media Diets

Does the internet facilitate selective exposure to politically congenial content? To answer this question, I introduce and validate large-N behavioral data on Americans' online media consumption in both 2015 and 2016. I then construct a simple measure of media diet slant and use machine classif...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:American journal of political science 2021-10, Vol.65 (4), p.1007-1022
Main Author: Guess, Andrew M.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Classification
Diet
Internet
Mass media
Moderation
News
Political parties
Selective exposure
Visibility
Websites
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Summary:Does the internet facilitate selective exposure to politically congenial content? To answer this question, I introduce and validate large-N behavioral data on Americans' online media consumption in both 2015 and 2016. I then construct a simple measure of media diet slant and use machine classification to identify individual articles related to news about politics. I find that most people across the political spectrum have relatively moderate media diets, about a quarter of which consist of mainstream news websites and portals. Quantifying the similarity of Democrats' and Republicans' media diets, I find nearly 65% overlap in the two groups' distributions in 2015 and roughly 50% in 2016. An exception to this picture is a small group of partisans who drive a disproportionate amount of traffic to ideologically slanted websites. If online "echo chambers" exist, they are a reality for relatively few people who may nonetheless exert disproportionate influence and visibility.
ISSN:0092-5853
1540-5907
DOI:10.1111/ajps.12589