Why Don’t We Learn from Social Media? Studying Effects of and Mechanisms behind Social Media News Use on General Surveillance Political Knowledge

Abstract

Does exposure to news affect what people know about politics? This old question attracted new scholarly interest as the political information environment is changing rapidly. In particular, since citizens have new channels at their disposal, such as Twitter and Facebook, which increasingly complement or even replace traditional channels of information. This study investigates to what extent citizens have knowledge about daily politics and to what extent news on social media can provide this knowledge. It does so by means of a large online survey in Belgium (Flanders), in which we measured what people know about current political events, their so-called general surveillance knowledge. Our findings demonstrate that unlike following news via traditional media channels, citizens do not gain more political knowledge from following news on social media. We even find a negative association between following the news on Facebook and political knowledge. We further investigate why this is the case. Our data demonstrate that this lack of learning on social media is not due to a narrow, personalized news diet, as is often suggested. Rather, we find evidence that following news via social media increases a feeling of information overload, which decreases what people actually learn, especially for citizens who combine news via social media with other news sources.

A Systematic Review of Worldwide Causal and Correlational Evidence on Digital Media and Democracy

“…Studies linking web-tracking and survey data showed increased learning about politics [99], but also a turning away from important topics [100], whereas other experiments demonstrated an overall beneficial effect of digital media on issue salience [101]. These findings, however, stand in contrast to fewer, yet several other studies that find a detrimental association between political knowledge and digital media use [102][103][104][105][106].…”

Navigating High-Choice European Political Information Environments: a Comparative Analysis of News User Profiles and Political Knowledge

“…Shehata and Strömbäck (2021), for example, conducted a longitudinal survey in Sweden and found that using social media for news, in contrast to online news websites and more traditional outlets, has null effects on political learning. Several other studies in different contexts have confirmed that people usually learn very little about political or societal relevant issues by following social media platforms like Facebook (Boukes 2019;Lee and Xenos 2019;van Erkel and Van Aelst 2020). Scholars have suggested multiple explanations for these findings, from the more personalized and one-sided streams of news to information overloads or simply a lack of relevant factual information on social media.…”

Why People Who Know Less Think They Know about COVID-19: Evidence from US and Singapore

“…Lee, , 2020Shehata & Strömbäck, 2018;van Erkel & Van Aelst, 2020). Such adverse pattern was consistent across crosssectional survey data (Cacciatore et al, 2018) and longitudinal survey data (S. Lee, 2020;van Erkel & Van Aelst, 2020)-and in various countries, such as the United States (S. Lee & Xenos, 2019;Oeldorf-Hirsch, 2018), Sweden (Shehata & Strömbäck, 2018), Belgium (van Erkel & Van Aelst, 2020), and Korea (S. Lee, 2019).…”