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.
This study provides the first direct assessment of the extent to which citizens encounter news and opinion challenging their political views via mass media. The widely accepted conjecture that people refuse to hear the other side is based upon self-reports of media exposure, rather than direct observation of it. In light of this long-acknowledged limitation, I leverage unique data tracking partisanship as well as actual exposure to media collected 24 7 via passive tracking devices. Contrary to previous understandings, the vast majority of citizens consume predominately centrist information, while frequently encountering ideological programming challenging their views. In fact, the best predictor of how much conservative news you watch is how much liberal news you watch, regardless of partisanship. The demonstration of widespread exposure to diverse viewpoints challenges claims asserting that resistance to political influence occurs at the exposure stage of the persuasion process. We present a preliminary but groundbreaking study of the media landscape of Twitter. We use public data on whom follows who to uncover common behaviour in media consumption, the relationship between various classes of media, and the diversity of media content which social links may bring. Our analysis shows that there is a non-negligible amount of indirect media exposure, either through friends who follow particular media sources, or via retweeted messages. We show that the indirect media exposure expands the political diversity of news to which users are exposed to a surprising extent, increasing the range by between 60-98 . These results are valuable because they have not been readily available to traditional media, and they can help predict how we will read news, and how publishers will interact with us in the future.