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Selective exposure shapes the Facebook news diet
Matteo Cinelli1, Emanuele Brugnoli1, Ana Lucia Schmidt2
1Applico Lab, CNR-ISC, Rome, Italy.
Plos One
|March 14, 2020
Summary
Users limit their news sources on social media, focusing on a few pages but engaging with diverse topics from those pages. This selective exposure may drive echo chamber formation online.
Area of Science:
- Social Sciences
- Computational Social Science
- Information Science
Background:
- Cognitive constraints limit human social relationships and information processing.
- Online information access is vast, yet user attention spans remain limited.
- Users often exhibit selective exposure, preferring information aligning with their viewpoints.
Purpose of the Study:
- To quantitatively analyze user attention economy in social media news consumption.
- To explore how users distribute their activity across news pages and topics.
- To distinguish between patterns of selective exposure and interest.
Main Methods:
- Analysis of 14 million users' interactions with 583 news outlets on Facebook over six years.
- Quantitative analysis of user activity distribution across news pages and topics.
- Development of a user behavior taxonomy to identify selective exposure and interest patterns.
Main Results:
- Users tend to follow a very limited number of news pages, regardless of their overall activity level.
- Users interact with a wide range of topics presented by their favored news pages.
- Selective exposure, consuming information aligning with preferred narratives, appears to be a key driver of consumption patterns.
Conclusions:
- User behavior on social media may lead to segregation within echo chambers.
- Selective exposure is a significant factor influencing how users consume news online.
- Understanding these patterns is crucial for addressing information consumption in the digital age.
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