Selective Exposure shapes the Facebook News Diet

Abstract

The social brain hypothesis fixes to 150 the number of social relationships we are able to maintain. Similar cognitive constraints emerge in several aspects of our daily life, from our mobility up to the way we communicate, and might even affect the way we consume information online. Indeed, despite the unprecedented amount of information we can access online, our attention span still remains limited. Furthermore, recent studies showed the tendency of users to ignore dissenting information but to interact with information adhering to their point of view. In this paper, we quantitatively analyze users' attention economy in news consumption on social media by analyzing 14M users interacting with 583 news outlets (pages) on Facebook over a time span of 6 years. In particular, we explore how users distribute their activity across news pages and topics. We find that, independently of their activity, users show the tendency to follow a very limited number of pages. On the other hand, users tend to interact with almost all the topics presented by their favored pages. Finally, we introduce a taxonomy accounting for users behavior to distinguish between patterns of selective exposure and interest. Our findings suggest that segregation of users in echo chambers might be an emerging effect of users' activity on social media and that selective exposure -- i.e. the tendency of users to consume information interest coherent with their preferences -- could be a major driver in their consumption patterns.

arXiv commentPLOS One Published: March 13, 2020

References in corpus (10)

• Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis
• Science vs Conspiracy: collective narratives in the age of (mis)information
• Validation of Dunbar's number in Twitter conversations
• The persistence of social signatures in human communication
• A network approach to topic models
• Hierarchical Block Structures and High-resolution Model Selection in Large Networks
• Nonparametric Bayesian inference of the microcanonical stochastic block model
• Model selection and hypothesis testing for large-scale network models with overlapping groups
• The Computer Science and Physics of Community Detection: Landscapes, Phase Transitions, and Hardness
• PopRank: Ranking pages' impact and users' engagement on Facebook

Cited by in corpus (14)

• The COVID-19 Social Media Infodemic
• Modeling how social network algorithms can influence opinion polarization
• Echo Chambers on Social Media: A comparative analysis
• Characterizing Engagement Dynamics across Topics on Facebook
• Ideology and polarization set the agenda on social media
• (Mis)Information Operations: An Integrated Perspective
• Lexical convergence and collective identities on Facebook
• News consumption and social media regulations policy
• Analyzing News Engagement on Facebook: Tracking Ideological Segregation and News Quality in the Facebook URL Dataset
• Drifts and Shifts: Characterizing the Evolution of Users Interests on Reddit
• A multilevel network approach to revealing patterns of online political selective exposure
• Apps, Places and People: strategies, limitations and trade-offs in the physical and digital worlds
• Information Consumption and Social Response in a Segregated Environment: the Case of Gab
• Understanding individual behaviour: from virtual to physical patterns