scholarly journals Echo-chambers in online news consumption: Evidence from survey and navigation data in Spain

2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 360-376 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana S Cardenal ◽  
Carlos Aguilar-Paredes ◽  
Camilo Cristancho ◽  
Sílvia Majó-Vázquez
Keyword(s):  
Media Exposure ◽  
Selective Exposure ◽  
Online News ◽  
Political Information ◽  
Online Data ◽  
Navigation Data ◽  
News Consumption ◽  
Echo Chambers ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Regular Patterns

Whether people live in echo-chambers when they consume political information online has been the subject of much academic and public debate. This article contributes to this debate combining survey and web-tracking online data from Spain, a country known for its high political parallelism. We find that users spend more time in outlets of their political leanings but, generally, they engage in considerable cross-partisan media exposure, especially those in the left. In addition, we use a quasi experiment to test how major news events affect regular patterns of news consumption, and particularly, selective exposure. We find that the nature of news explains changes in users’ overall consumption behaviour, but this has less to do with the type of event than with the interest it arouses. More importantly, we find that users become more polarized along party lines as the level of news consumption and interest for news increases.

Partisan selective exposure in online news consumption: evidence from the 2016 presidential campaign

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Peterson ◽  
Sharad Goel ◽  
Shanto Iyengar
Keyword(s):  
National Sample ◽  
Selective Exposure ◽  
Online News ◽  
Presidential Campaign ◽  
Absolute Level ◽  
Presidential Candidates ◽  
Political News ◽  
News Consumption ◽  
Contemporary Media ◽  
Election News

Abstract Where do partisans get their election news in the contemporary media environment? We track the online news consumption of a national sample during the 2016 presidential campaign. We find levels of partisan isolation in news exposure are two to three times greater than in prior studies, although the absolute level of isolation remains modest. The partisan divide for election-related news exceeds the divide for non-political news. This tendency of partisans to follow like-minded news providers occurs despite the relatively small differences in the partisan slant of the content offered by the majority of sources they visited. Finally, we find that partisans who gravitated to congenial news providers did not shift their evaluations of the presidential candidates during the campaign.

Filter Bubbles, Echo Chambers, and Online News Consumption

2016 ◽  
Vol 80 (S1) ◽  
pp. 298-320 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seth Flaxman ◽  
Sharad Goel ◽  
Justin M. Rao
Keyword(s):  
Online News ◽  
News Consumption ◽  
Echo Chambers ◽  
Filter Bubbles

scholarly journals Incidental Exposure to Non-Like-Minded News through Social Media: Opposing Voices in Echo-Chambers’ News Feeds

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 53-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pere Masip ◽  
Jaume Suau ◽  
Carlos Ruiz-Caballero
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
News Media ◽  
Selective Exposure ◽  
Online News ◽  
Audience Participation ◽  
News Content ◽  
Media System ◽  
Weak Association ◽  
Echo Chambers ◽  
Incidental Exposure

Debates about post-truth need to take into account how news re-disseminates in a hybrid media system in which social networks and audience participation play a central role. Hence, there is a certain risk of reducing citizens’ exposure to politically adverse news content, creating ‘echo chambers’ of political affinity. This article presents the results of research conducted in agreement with 18 leading Spanish online news media, based on a survey (N = 6625) of their registered users. The results highlight that high levels of selective exposure that are a characteristic of offline media consumption are being moderated in the online realm. Although most of the respondents get news online from like-minded media, the figures related to those who also get news from media with a different media ideology should not be underestimated. As news consumption is becoming more ‘social,’ our research points out that Spanish citizens who are more active on social media sites are more likely to be exposed to news content from different ideological positions than those who are less active users. There is a weak association between the use of a particular social network site and gaining access to like- and non-like-minded news.

scholarly journals Porous Chambers, Echoes of Valence and Stereotypes

2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate M. Turetsky ◽  
Travis A. Riddle
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Emotional Valence ◽  
Selective Exposure ◽  
Online News ◽  
News Sources ◽  
News Organizations ◽  
Echo Chambers ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
High Connectivity

Selective exposure to one-sided news coverage, especially of controversial geopolitical events, may contribute to growing social polarization. Existing research on “echo chambers”—fragmented information environments that amplify homogeneous perspectives—focuses on the degree to which individuals and social media platforms shape informational segregation. Here, we explore whether news organizations directly contribute to echo chambers through the hyperlinks they embed in online articles. Using network and text analysis, we examined coverage of the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, and found that online news media exhibited weak community structure and high connectivity across news outlets. However, analyses also indicated that media sources were more likely to link to coverage that was similar to their own in terms of emotional valence and stereotype-relevant aspects of the events. While hyperlinking to diverse news sources may ameliorate fragmented information environments, selectively linking to similar coverage may contribute to growing polarization.

scholarly journals There can be only one truth: Ideological segregation and online news communities in Ukraine

2021 ◽  
pp. 174276652110099
Author(s):  
Aleksandra Urman ◽  
Mykola Makhortykh
Keyword(s):  
Online News ◽  
Online Platform ◽  
News Content ◽  
Echo Chambers ◽  
Region Of Residence ◽  
Online Environments ◽  
Partisan News

The paper examines ideological segregation among Ukrainian users in online environments, using as a case study partisan news communities on Vkontakte, the largest online platform in post-communist states. Its findings suggest that despite their insignificant numbers, partisan news communities attract substantial attention from Ukrainian users and can encourage the formation of isolated ideological cliques – or ‘echo chambers’ – that increase societal polarisation. The paper also investigates factors that predict users’ interest in partisan content and establishes that the region of residence is the key predictor of selective consumption of pro-Ukrainian or pro-Russian partisan news content.

scholarly journals Echo chamber detection and analysis

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Giacomo Villa ◽  
Gabriella Pasi ◽  
Marco Viviani
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Community Detection ◽  
Virtual Communities ◽  
Selective Exposure ◽  
Social Needs ◽  
News Sources ◽  
Detection Strategy ◽  
Echo Chambers ◽  
Echo Chamber ◽  
Content Aware

AbstractSocial media allow to fulfill perceived social needs such as connecting with friends or other individuals with similar interests into virtual communities; they have also become essential as news sources, microblogging platforms, in particular, in a variety of contexts including that of health. However, due to the homophily property and selective exposure to information, social media have the tendency to create distinct groups of individuals whose ideas are highly polarized around certain topics. In these groups, a.k.a. echo chambers, people only "hear their own voice,” and divergent visions are no longer taken into account. This article focuses on the study of the echo chamber phenomenon in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, by considering both the relationships connecting individuals and semantic aspects related to the content they share over Twitter. To this aim, we propose an approach based on the application of a community detection strategy to distinct topology- and content-aware representations of the COVID-19 conversation graph. Then, we assess and analyze the controversy and homogeneity among the different polarized groups obtained. The evaluations of the approach are carried out on a dataset of tweets related to COVID-19 collected between January and March 2020.

The paradox of pluralism: A key to interpreting the online public sphere in the time of ‘encastellation’

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriele Giacomini
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Political System ◽  
Selective Exposure ◽  
The Internet ◽  
New Concepts ◽  
Echo Chambers ◽  
Filter Bubbles

This viewpoint makes a theoretical effort to label the organization of the virtual sphere under new concepts: ‘encastellation’ and the ‘paradox of pluralism’. The former is a metaphorical synthesis of already-known concepts (selective exposure, polarization, homophily, echo chambers and filter bubbles). In the second case, we emphasize the existence of a ‘paradox of online pluralism’: the internet has increased the possibility for everyone to make their voice heard (in quantitative terms), but at the same time it appears to also be increasing the distance between voices, putting in jeopardy the achievement of the aims of the pluralist political system (in qualitative terms). In conclusion, we express doubts about the feasibility of the deliberative vision of democracy in the current virtual sphere.

Een typologie van jonge nieuwsgebruikers in een multimediaal landschap

2011 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Van Cauwenberge ◽  
Hans Beentjes ◽  
Leen d’Haenens
Keyword(s):  
Cluster Analysis ◽  
News Media ◽  
Television News ◽  
Online News ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Low Level ◽  
News Consumption ◽  
Combined Use ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Online News Sites

A typology of young news users in the Low Countries A typology of young news users in the Low Countries This article investigates different types of young news users (15-34 years) in the Low Countries. Therefore a survey among 1200 Flemish and Dutch youngsters and adolescents was conducted, analyzing the combined use of media platforms for news consumption and time spent with these news carriers. The cluster analysis identified five types of news users: the sound and vision group, characterized by the use of mainly audiovisual news platforms, combined with online news sites; the e-news users, who give most prominence to online news sites but also rely on traditional news platforms, the all rounders, depending on a range of off- and online news channels; the traditionalists, who spent most time with offline news media; and the dabblers, a group with an overall low level of news consumption. Our results indicate that Flemish and Dutch youngsters combine online and traditional news platforms for their news gathering, giving most prominence to traditional news media, especially television news.

The Backbone Structure of Audience Networks: A New Approach to Comparing Online News Consumption Across Countries

2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-240 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sílvia Majó-Vázquez ◽  
Rasmus K. Nielsen ◽  
Sandra González-Bailón
Keyword(s):  
Online News ◽  
New Approach ◽  
News Consumption ◽  
Backbone Structure

Revived and Refreshed

2011 ◽  
pp. 196-217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas J. Johnson ◽  
Shannon L. Bichard ◽  
Weiwu Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Strong Support ◽  
Selective Exposure ◽  
Political Information ◽  
Political Factors ◽  
Online Panel ◽  
Internet Users ◽  
Political Networks

This study uses an online panel of Internet users to examine the degree to which those who visit U.S. political websites and blogs practice selective exposure as they construct their individual political networks. Specifically, the analysis addresses the extent to which individuals say they visit websites and blogs with which they agree and disagree. The findings indicate strong support for the detection of selective exposure in this context. Reliance on political websites and blogs as well as partisanship emerged as predictors of selective exposure for political information after controlling for demographic and political factors.

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