[HN Gopher] Social Media, News Consumption, and Polarization: A ...
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Social Media, News Consumption, and Polarization: A Field
Experiment (2020)
Author : dash2
Score : 39 points
Date : 2021-03-10 14:55 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (papers.ssrn.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (papers.ssrn.com)
| smoldesu wrote:
| This is pretty interesting, but I've always thought that the
| sensationalist side of social media exacerbates this issue.
| Everyone is driven by clicks, so writing with a sense of urgency
| (not necessarily extremism) will drive your interaction up. It's
| part of what makes social media so exhausting these days: a
| billion users are all jockeying for your attention, and you need
| to trust that Facebook/Twitter/Reddit/$OTHER_SITE will direct
| your focus to the things that matter. And when everything
| "matters", nothing does. We've become desensitized to importance,
| and I imagine it will have a considerable impact on the future of
| journalism and how we interact with it.
| isoskeles wrote:
| I wonder what effect this has on peoples' perceptions and
| willingness for political parties to negotiate and compromise. My
| general sense is that polarization makes compromise practically
| impossible, hindering democracy (in the US) to a point where it
| looks too ineffective.
|
| ---
|
| More personally, most of the political news media I 'consume'
| comes from outlets that oppose my own perspective. I used to
| think I was 'hate-listening' to this stuff, but I also realized
| that listening to outlets I already agree with feels a bit too
| _self-indulgent_ for me. I 'm curious if this is like a separate
| form of junk food that requires its own kind of self-control to
| avoid.
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| I would love to see this done in more realistic dimensions, not
| just "liberal" & "conservative".
| nerdponx wrote:
| This is a really interesting article, because it's actually about
| something more fundamental than filter bubbles, and it turns out
| that Facebook creating filter bubbles is pretty much a corollary.
|
| The abstract:
|
| Does the consumption of ideologically congruent news on social
| media exacerbate polarization? I estimate the effects of social
| media news exposure by conducting a large field experiment
| randomly offering participants subscriptions to conservative or
| liberal news outlets on Facebook. I collect data on the causal
| chain of media effects: subscriptions to outlets, exposure to
| news on Facebook, visits to online news sites, and sharing of
| posts, as well as changes in political opinions and attitudes.
| Four main findings emerge. First, random variation in exposure to
| news on social media substantially affects the slant of news
| sites individuals visit. Second, exposure to counter-attitudinal
| news decreases negative attitudes toward the opposing political
| party. Third, in contrast to the effect on attitudes, I find no
| evidence that the political leanings of news outlets affect
| political opinions. Fourth, Facebook's algorithm is less likely
| to supply individuals with posts from counter-attitudinal
| outlets, conditional on individuals subscribing to them.
| Together, the results suggest that social media algorithms may
| limit exposure to counter-attitudinal news and thus increase
| polarization.
| im3w1l wrote:
| In what sense is conditional used here? E(X | Y) or E(X | Y =
| y) ?
| dash2 wrote:
| Yup, what Facebook does is just one of the results. It also
| suggests the kind of nudges Facebook _could_ do.
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