Communication Research· 2012Q1
Selective Exposure in the Age of Social Media
- 897citations
- Q1SCImago
- 2012year
Short summary
Social media endorsements reduce partisan selective exposure to news to levels indistinguishable from chance, challenging the idea that the internet inherently exacerbates media fragmentation.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Key points
- Social media's structure, emphasizing social value over partisanship, influences news selection.
- Social endorsements on social media act as decision heuristics, increasing content selection probability.
- Social endorsements reduce partisan selective exposure to news to levels indistinguishable from chance.
- The findings contradict the assumption that the internet inherently leads to greater media fragmentation.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
Much of the literature on polarization and selective exposure presumes that the internet exacerbates the fragmentation of the media and the citizenry. Yet this ignores how the widespread use of social media changes news consumption. Social media provide readers a choice of stories from different sources that come recommended from politically heterogeneous individuals, in a context that emphasizes social value over partisan affiliation. Building on existing models of news selectivity to emphasize information utility, we hypothesize that social media’s distinctive feature, social endorsements, trigger several decision heuristics that suggest utility. In two experiments, we demonstrate that stronger social endorsements increase the probability that people select content and that their presence reduces partisan selective exposure to levels indistinguishable from chance.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Communication Research, 2012 · DOI ↗
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Field: Communication
CommunicationSocial Sciences