Asymmetric ideological segregation in exposure to political news on Facebook

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Gonzalez-Bailon, Sandra; Lazer, David; Barbera, Pablo; Zhang, Meiqing; Allcott, Hunt; Brown, Taylor; Crespo-Tenorio, Adriana; Freelon, Deen; Gentzkow, Matthew; Guess, Andrew M.; Iyengar, Shanto; Kim, Young Mie; Malhotra, Neil; Moehler, Devra; Nyhan, Brendan; Pan, Jennifer; Rivera, Carlos Velasco; Settle, Jaime; Thorson, Emily; Tromble, Rebekah; Wilkins, Arjun; Wojcieszak, Magdalena; de Jonge, Chad Kiewiet; Franco, Annie; Mason, Winter; Stroud, Natalie Jomini; Tucker, Joshua A.
• 署名单位: University of Pennsylvania; Northeastern University; Stanford University; Stanford University; Princeton University; Princeton University; Stanford University; University of Wisconsin System; University of Wisconsin Madison; Stanford University; Dartmouth College; Stanford University; Syracuse University; George Washington University; George Washington University; University of California System; University of California Davis; University of Amsterdam; University of Texas System; University of Texas Austin; University of Texas System; University of Texas Austin; New York University; New York University
• 刊物名称: SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0036-12520
• DOI: 10.1126/science.ade7138
• 发表日期: 2023-07-28
• 页码: 392-398
• 关键词: online; attention; networks

摘要

Does Facebook enable ideological segregation in political news consumption? We analyzed exposure to news during the US 2020 election using aggregated data for 208 million US Facebook users. We compared the inventory of all political news that users could have seen in their feeds with the information that they saw (after algorithmic curation) and the information with which they engaged. We show that (i) ideological segregation is high and increases as we shift from potential exposure to actual exposure to engagement; (ii) there is an asymmetry between conservative and liberal audiences, with a substantial corner of the news ecosystem consumed exclusively by conservatives; and (iii) most misinformation, as identified by Meta's Third-Party Fact-Checking Program, exists within this homogeneously conservative corner, which has no equivalent on the liberal side. Sources favored by conservative audiences were more prevalent on Facebook's news ecosystem than those favored by liberals.