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Social media users are able to read, share, and discuss news online with other people coming from diverse contexts in their lives, including family members, co-workers, and friends. Past research has indicated that “context collapse” occurs when people must imagine and negotiate interacting with a large and diverse online audience. Using survey data from 771 US Internet users, we find that more context collapse in people’s Facebook friends is positively related to both sharing and reading news. Furthermore, reading news on Facebook mediates the relationship between context collapse and news sharing. Finally, privacy management moderates the relationship between reading and sharing news on Facebook, where people who are more open in their privacy management practices share more news.

This study investigated biased message processing of political satire in The Colbert Report and the influence of political ideology on perceptions of Stephen Colbert. Results indicate that political ideology influences biased processing of ambiguous political messages and source in late-night comedy. Using data from an experiment (N = 332), we found that individual-level political ideology significantly predicted perceptions of Colbert's political ideology. Additionally, there was no significant difference between the groups in thinking Colbert was funny, but conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements. Conservatism also significantly predicted perceptions that Colbert disliked liberalism. Finally, a post hoc analysis revealed that perceptions of Colbert's political opinions fully mediated the relationship between political ideology and individual-level opinion.

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Using the theoretical framework of the Reinforcing Spirals Model, we examine overtime relationships between partisan political discussion and affective political polarization using two threewave datasets collected during the 2016 and 2012 US Presidential Elections. Our results during both election cycles indicated that higher levels of polarization at wave 1 were associated with an increased discussion with like-minded partners at wave 2, which was associated with higher levels of polarization at wave 3. In all, these findings demonstrate support that reinforcing spirals occur through partisan political discussion on affective partisan attitudes.