Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

5-2013

Abstract

The hypothesis of selective exposure assumes that people crave like-minded information and eschew information that conflicts with their beliefs, and that has negative consequences on political life. Yet, despite decades of research, this hypothesis remains theoretically promising but empirically difficult to test. We look into news articles shared on Facebook and examine whether selective exposure exists or not in social media. We find a concrete evidence for a tendency that users predominantly share like-minded news articles and avoid conflicting ones, and partisans are more likely to do that. Building tools to counter partisanship on social media would require the ability to identify partisan users first. We will show that those users cannot be distinguished from the average user as the two subgroups do not show any demographic difference.

Keywords

Facebook, news aggregators, online news consumption, selective exposure, social media

Discipline

Databases and Information Systems | Social Media

Research Areas

Data Science and Engineering

Publication

WWW '13 Companion: Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on World Wide Web

First Page

51

Last Page

52

ISBN

9781450320382

Identifier

10.1145/2487788.2487807

Publisher

ACM

City or Country

New York

Copyright Owner and License

Publisher

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1145/2487788.2487807

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