Selective Exposure in the Age of Social Media

Abstract

Much of the literature on polarization and selective exposure presumes that the internet exacerbates the fragmentation of the media and the citizenry. Yet this ignores how the widespread use of social media changes news consumption. Social media provide readers a choice of stories from different sources that come recommended from politically heterogeneous individuals, in a context that emphasizes social value over partisan affiliation. Building on existing models of news selectivity to emphasize information utility, we hypothesize that social media's distinctive feature, social endorsements, trigger several decision heuristics that suggest utility. In two experiments, we demonstrate that stronger social endorsements increase the probability that people select content and that their presence reduces partisan selective exposure to levels indistinguishable from chance.

Selective Use of News Cues: A Multiple-Motive Perspective on Information Selection in Social Media Environments

“…On the other hand, people's freedom of choice may result in the selection of content that is likely to strengthen their initial viewpoints but unlikely to enhance their knowledge (Iyengar & Hahn, 2009;Stroud, 2011). Research on selective exposure online has yielded support for the notion of such attitude-consistent choices (e.g., Garrett, 2009a;Knobloch-Westerwick & Meng, 2009), but has also demonstrated patterns of more open-minded information selection with a preference for balanced content (Winter & Krämer, 2012).Contemporary social recommendations, such as a variety of online rating mechanisms or Facebook "likes," also offer opportunities to guide users' information selection decisions (Messing & Westwood, 2014). With regard to the democratic potential of the Internet, following the opinions of others may not only be beneficial in overcoming attitude-consistent choices but also raises concerns that audience recommendations might gravitate toward tabloid or soft news content (Yang, 2016).…”

Selecting Serious or Satirical, Supporting or Stirring News? Selective Exposure to Partisan versus Mockery News Online Videos

“…Although this proposition was not consistently supported in earlier political communication research (see Donsbach, 2009, for a review), recent work has yielded consensus on such confirmation bias (Knobloch-Westerwick, 2015). Moreover, the increased ease of message selection in the Internet era is thought to allow recipients to block out counterattitudinal messages even more effectively (Bennett & Iyengar, 2008), for instance via social media (Messing & Westwood, 2014) and automated filtering algorithms (Pariser, 2011). This trend raises concerns for a functional democracy, which is based on an informed, deliberate citizenry.…”

Understanding Conspiracy Online: Social Media and the Spread of Suspicious Thinking

“…Filter bubbles generally refer to how a combination of personal preference and learning algorithms for displaying content, such as Facebook's news feed or Google's search personalization, results in users only being exposed to information that aligns with their pre-established beliefs. Thus, an echo chamber forms -sometimes without a user's knowledge (Flaxman, Goel, & Rao, 2016;Messing & Westwood, 2014). The term "filter bubble" originates from Pariser's 2011 book of the same name.…”

“…Thus, a popular source seems to encourage users to ignore any filtering practices they may have, increasing the diversity of opinions they are exposed to. They claim that this will "make it less likely for individuals to fall victim to falsehoods" (Messing & Westwood, 2014, p. 1058). …”