Asymmetric ideological segregation in exposure to political news on Facebook

Author:

González-Bailón Sandra1ORCID,Lazer David2ORCID,Barberá Pablo3ORCID,Zhang Meiqing3ORCID,Allcott Hunt4,Brown Taylor3ORCID,Crespo-Tenorio Adriana3,Freelon Deen1ORCID,Gentzkow Matthew5ORCID,Guess Andrew M.6ORCID,Iyengar Shanto7ORCID,Kim Young Mie8ORCID,Malhotra Neil9ORCID,Moehler Devra3ORCID,Nyhan Brendan10ORCID,Pan Jennifer11ORCID,Rivera Carlos Velasco3,Settle Jaime12ORCID,Thorson Emily13ORCID,Tromble Rebekah14ORCID,Wilkins Arjun3,Wojcieszak Magdalena1516ORCID,de Jonge Chad Kiewiet3,Franco Annie3,Mason Winter3ORCID,Stroud Natalie Jomini1718ORCID,Tucker Joshua A.1920ORCID

Affiliation:

1. Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA.

2. Network Science Institute, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA.

3. Meta, Menlo Park, CA, USA.

4. Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA.

5. Department of Economics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA.

6. Department of Politics and School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA.

7. Department of Political Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA.

8. School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI, USA.

9. Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA.

10. Department of Government, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA.

11. Department of Communication, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA.

12. Department of Government, William & Mary, Williamsburg, VA, USA.

13. Department of Political Science, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA.

14. School of Media and Public Affairs and Institute for Data, Democracy, and Politics, The George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA.

15. Department of Communication, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, USA.

16. Amsterdam School of Communication Research, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

17. Moody College of Communication, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA.

18. Center for Media Engagement, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA.

19. Wilf Family Department of Politics, New York University, New York, NY, USA.

20. Center for Social Media and Politics, New York University, New York, NY, USA.

Abstract

Does Facebook enable ideological segregation in political news consumption? We analyzed exposure to news during the US 2020 election using aggregated data for 208 million US Facebook users. We compared the inventory of all political news that users could have seen in their feeds with the information that they saw (after algorithmic curation) and the information with which they engaged. We show that (i) ideological segregation is high and increases as we shift from potential exposure to actual exposure to engagement; (ii) there is an asymmetry between conservative and liberal audiences, with a substantial corner of the news ecosystem consumed exclusively by conservatives; and (iii) most misinformation, as identified by Meta’s Third-Party Fact-Checking Program, exists within this homogeneously conservative corner, which has no equivalent on the liberal side. Sources favored by conservative audiences were more prevalent on Facebook’s news ecosystem than those favored by liberals.

Publisher

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

Subject

Multidisciplinary

Reference35 articles.

1. E. Shearer “More than eight-in-ten Americans get news from digital devices” (Technical Report Pew Research Center 2021).

2. Studying human attention on the Internet

3. Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook

4. C. R. Sunstein # Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media (Princeton University Press 2017).

5. E. Pariser The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web is Changing What We Read and How We Think (Penguin 2011).

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