An issue public’s confirmation-biased news feeding in changing political constellations: A quasi-experimental field study in the German conflict over genome editing

Abstract

Contributing to the study of curated news flows, we investigated how conflicting participants in an issue public fed mainstream news into their Twitter networks. In a quasi-experimental field study in the context of the 2018 European Court of Justice’s ruling on genome editing, we combined standardized manual content analyses of a universe of legacy media news items ( N = 165), users’ tweets (“feeds”) linking these news items ( N = 2014), and users’ profiles ( N = 1070). Confirming existing knowledge, opponents and proponents of genetically modified organisms largely fed news items confirming their issue attitudes. Extending existing knowledge, we show that counter-attitudinal news feeding became more likely when users had a political disadvantage rather than a political advantage in the controversy. However, this was only true for the more active but not for the more inactive news feeders.