TY - JOUR
T1 - Asymmetric ideological segregation in exposure to political news on Facebook
AU - González-Bailón, Sandra
AU - Lazer, David
AU - Barberá, Pablo
AU - Zhang, Meiqing
AU - Allcott, Hunt
AU - Brown, Taylor
AU - Crespo-Tenorio, Adriana
AU - Freelon, Deen
AU - Gentzkow, Matthew
AU - Guess, Andrew M.
AU - Iyengar, Shanto
AU - Kim, Young Mie
AU - Malhotra, Neil
AU - Moehler, Devra
AU - Nyhan, Brendan
AU - Pan, Jennifer
AU - Rivera, Carlos Velasco
AU - Settle, Jaime
AU - Thorson, Emily
AU - Tromble, Rebekah
AU - Wilkins, Arjun
AU - Wojcieszak, Magdalena
AU - De Jonge, Chad Kiewiet
AU - Franco, Annie
AU - Mason, Winter
AU - Stroud, Natalie Jomini
AU - Tucker, Joshua A.
N1 - Funding Information:
The costs associated with the research (such as participant fees, recruitment and data collection) were paid by Meta. Ancillary support (for example, research assistants and course buyouts) was sourced, where applicable, by academics from the Democracy Fund, the Hopewell Fund, the Guggenheim Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Charles Koch Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the University of Texas at Austin, New York University, Stanford University, the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 The Authors.
PY - 2023/7/28
Y1 - 2023/7/28
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
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U2 - 10.1126/science.ade7138
DO - 10.1126/science.ade7138
M3 - Article
C2 - 37499003
AN - SCOPUS:85165815218
SN - 0036-8075
VL - 381
SP - 392
EP - 398
JO - Science
JF - Science
IS - 6656
ER -