The hypothesis of selective exposure assumes that people seek out information that supports their views and eschew information that conflicts with their beliefs, and that has negative consequences on our society. Few researchers have recently found counter evidence of selective exposure in social media: users are exposed to politically diverse articles. No work has looked at what happens after exposure, particularly how individuals react to such exposure, though. Users might well be exposed to diverse articles but share only the partisan ones. To test this, we study partisan sharing on Facebook: the tendency for users to predominantly share like-minded news articles and avoid conflicting ones. We verified four main hypotheses. That is, whether partisan sharing: 1) exists at all; 2) changes across individuals (e.g., depending on their interest in politics); 3) changes over time (e.g., around elections); and 4) changes depending on perceived importance of topics. We indeed find strong evidence for partisan sharing. To test whether it has any consequence in the real world, we built a web application for BBC viewers of a popular political program, resulting in a controlled experiment involving more than 70 individuals. Based on what they share and on survey data, we find that partisan sharing has negative consequences: distorted perception of reality. However, we do also find positive aspects of partisan sharing: it is associated with people who are more knowledgeable about politics and engage more with it as they are more likely to vote in the general elections.
By analyzing news consumption on a variety of media (which included TV, radio, magazines, newspapers, online), Stroud @cite_16 concluded that people tend to preferentially choose, read, and enjoy partisan news. A large body of literature shows supportive evidence for her findings @cite_30 @cite_10 @cite_28 @cite_37 @cite_14 . More recently, some researchers have reported situations in which selective exposure is lower than expected or totally missing. LaCour did not find any evidence for it in the TV and radio consumption of 920 individuals in Chicago and New York @cite_20 ; Shapiro found an extremely low level of it online @cite_1 ; and even found that Twitter friends expand one's diversity of political news @cite_8 .
@cite_30 @cite_37 @cite_14 @cite_8 @cite_28 @cite_1 @cite_16 @cite_10 @cite_20
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The Internet gives individuals more choice in political news and information sources and more tools to filter out disagreeable information. Citing the preference described by selective exposure theory — people prefer information that supports their beliefs and avoid counter-attitudinal information — observers warn that people may use these tools to access only agreeable information and thus live in ideological echo chambers. We report on a field deployment of a browser extension that showed users feedback about the political lean of their weekly and all time reading behaviors. Compared to a control group, showing feedback led to a modest move toward balanced exposure, corresponding to 1-2 visits per week to ideologically opposing sites or 5-10 additional visits per week to centrist sites. The hypothesis of selective exposure assumes that people seek out information that supports their views and eschew information that conflicts with their beliefs, and that has negative consequences on our society. Few researchers have recently found counter evidence of selective exposure in social media: users are exposed to politically diverse articles. No work has looked at what happens after exposure, particularly how individuals react to such exposure, though. Users might well be exposed to diverse articles but share only the partisan ones. To test this, we study partisan sharing on Facebook: the tendency for users to predominantly share like-minded news articles and avoid conflicting ones. We verified four main hypotheses. That is, whether partisan sharing: 1) exists at all; 2) changes across individuals (e.g., depending on their interest in politics); 3) changes over time (e.g., around elections); and 4) changes depending on perceived importance of topics. We indeed find strong evidence for partisan sharing. To test whether it has any consequence in the real world, we built a web application for BBC viewers of a popular political program, resulting in a controlled experiment involving more than 70 individuals. Based on what they share and on survey data, we find that partisan sharing has negative consequences: distorted perception of reality. However, we do also find positive aspects of partisan sharing: it is associated with people who are more knowledgeable about politics and engage more with it as they are more likely to vote in the general elections. We hypothesize that in the real world, as opposed to the lab, the norm is for people to experience friendly media that favor their political predispositions when political favoritism is perceived at all. For this reason, media are generally limited in their ability to create cross-cutting exposure. We test this hypothesis using representative survey data drawn from 11 different countries with varying media systems. We further hypothesize that television will contribute more to cross-cutting exposure than newspapers. Finally, and most importantly, we test the hypothesis that the more the structure of a country's media system parallels that of its political parties, the more that country's population will be dominated by exposure to like-minded views via mass media. We find confirmation for all 3 of these hypotheses and discuss their implications for the role of mass media in providing exposure to cross-cutting political perspectives. In a news media environment characterized by abundant choice, it is becoming increasingly easy for Americans to choose news sources slanted toward their own political views rather than sources providing more diverse perspectives. This development poses a challenge to ideals of deliberative democracy if people who consume politically like-minded news disproportionately populate the electoral process, while those presumably reaping the benefits of exposure to more diverse views in the news (e.g., more informed, tolerant attitudes) withdraw from politics. Using panel data collected during the 2008 presidential campaign, this study investigates the proposition that exposure to news slanted toward one's own partisan views increases political participation, while exposure to news with the opposite partisan slant depresses participation. The results suggest that, while exposure to partisan news does not alter the strongly habitual decision to turn out, the hypothesized energizing and enervating effects of exposure do appear for other behavior during the campaign; the partisan hue of the news sources citizens choose to consume affects both when voters decide and their levels of participation over time.