Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook

Exposure to news, opinion, and civic information increasingly occurs through social media. How do these online networks influence exposure to perspectives that cut across ideological lines? Using deidentified data, we examined how 10.1 million U.S. Facebook users interact with socially shared news....

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science) 2015-06, Vol.348 (6239), p.1130-1132
Main Authors: Bakshy, Eytan, Messing, Solomon, Adamic, Lada A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Algorithms
Constraining
Digital media
Exposure
Ideology
Mass Media
Networks
News
Politics
Ranking
Social Media
Social networks
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Summary:Exposure to news, opinion, and civic information increasingly occurs through social media. How do these online networks influence exposure to perspectives that cut across ideological lines? Using deidentified data, we examined how 10.1 million U.S. Facebook users interact with socially shared news. We directly measured ideological homophily in friend networks and examined the extent to which heterogeneous friends could potentially expose individuals to cross-cutting content. We then quantified the extent to which individuals encounter comparatively more or less diverse content while interacting via Facebook's algorithmically ranked News Feed and further studied users' choices to click through to ideologically discordant content. Compared with algorithmic ranking, individuals' choices played a stronger role in limiting exposure to cross-cutting content.
ISSN:0036-8075
1095-9203
DOI:10.1126/science.aaa1160