Publication Type
Conference Proceeding Article
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
10-2014
Abstract
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.
Keywords
Facebook, news aggregators, online social network, partisan sharing, politics, selective exposure, social media, Twitter
Discipline
Artificial Intelligence and Robotics | Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing
Research Areas
Data Science and Engineering; Information Systems and Management
Publication
Proceedings of the second ACM conference on online social networks
First Page
13
Last Page
24
ISBN
9781450331982
Identifier
10.1145/2660460.2660469
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
City or Country
Dublin, Ireland
Citation
AN, Jisun; QUERCIA, Daniele; and CROWCROFT, Jon.
Partisan sharing: Facebook evidence and societal consequences. (2014). Proceedings of the second ACM conference on online social networks. 13-24.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/6585
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Included in
Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Commons, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing Commons