Citation

Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook

Author:
Bakshy, E.; Messing, S.; Adamic, L. A.
Publication:
Science
Year:
2015

Exposure to news, opinion, and civic information increasingly occurs through social media. How do these online networks in uence exposure to perspectives that cut across ideological lines? Using deidenti ed data, we examined how 10.1 million U.S. Facebook users interact with socially shared news. We directly measured ideological homophily in friend networks and examined the extent to which heterogeneous friends could potentially expose individuals to cross-cutting content. We then quanti ed the extent to which individuals encounter comparatively more or less diverse content while interacting via Facebook’s algorithmically ranked News Feed and further studied users’ choices to click through to ideologically discordant content. Compared with algorithmic ranking, individuals’ choices played a stronger role in limiting exposure to cross-cutting content.