Anatomy of news consumption on Facebook

Abstract

The advent of social media and microblogging platforms has radically changed the way we consume information and form opinions. In this paper, we explore the anatomy of the information space on Facebook by characterizing on a global scale the news consumption patterns of 376 million users over a time span of 6 y (January 2010 to December 2015). We find that users tend to focus on a limited set of pages, producing a sharp community structure among news outlets. We also find that the preferences of users and news providers differ. By tracking how Facebook pages "like" each other and examining their geolocation, we find that news providers are more geographically confined than users. We devise a simple model of selective exposure that reproduces the observed connectivity patterns.computational social science | Facebook | news consumption | misinformation A large body of research has addressed news consumption on online social media and its polarizing effect on public opinion (1-5). Social media and microblogging platforms have changed the way we access information and form opinions. Communication has become increasingly personalized, both in the way messages are framed and how they are shared across social networks. Furthermore, according to a recent study (6), ∼63% of users acquire their news from social media, and these news are subject to the same popularity dynamics as other forms of content. Recent works (7) provide empirical evidence of the pivotal role of confirmation bias and selective exposure in online social dynamics. Users, indeed, tend to focus on specific narratives and join polarized groups (i.e., echo chambers) (8-10), where they end up reinforcing their worldview [even if pieces of content are deliberately false (11, 12)] and dismissing contradictory information (13). Discussion and elaboration of narratives in such a segregated environment elicits group polarization and negatively influences user emotion (14-17). Therefore, in this paper, to better understand how echo chambers emerge, we explore the anatomy of news consumption on Facebook. We focus on how Facebook posts from news outlets are consumed and how user activity causes connectivity patterns to emerge. We analyze the interaction of 376 million users with all of the anglophone news outlets on Facebook listed in the European Media Monitor (18) over a 6-y time span, from January 2010 to December 2015. Using quantitative analysis, we find evidence that selective exposure plays a pivotal role in shaping news consumption online. Users tend to focus on a very limited set of pages and thus create a distinct community structure within these news outlets. We also find that the perspectives of the news outlets and the users differ. Our findings suggest that users have a more cosmopolitan perspective of the information space than news providers. Examining how pages "like" each other and taking into account their geolocation, we find geographically confined connectivity patterns. We conclude by devising a simple model of selective exposure that reprodu...

Network Structure and Patterns of Information Diversity on Twitter

“…Predicted behavior depends on which part of the system you are looking at, but on average, Twitter accounts post more centrist information than they receive in their own timelines, undercutting the prevailing narrative of the social media echo chamber (e.g. Schmidt, et al, 2017). Instead, the widespread perception of such polarization may be the result of a network paradox, in which the behavior of nodes with a high degree is mistaken to be typical (Feld, 1991).…”

An Evaluation of Retrospective Facebook Content Collection

“…Facebook is the online social network site with the greatest reach in most countries and it is considered an important platform for political communication. Scholars investigated, for example, how political parties communicate on Facebook (Arzheimer, 2015;Magin, Podschuweit, Haßler, & Russmann, 2016;Stier et al, 2018;Stier, Posch, Bleier, & Strohmaier, 2017), how users interact with posts from media organizations' pages (Schmidt et al, 2017), or which (media) sources were referred to by parties and their followers on political pages (Bachl, 2018).…”

“…The sampling period of Stier et al (2017) was December 2014 to August 2016, all content was collected at the end of the sampling period. Schmidt et al (2017) proceeded similarly for their sampling period of six years (January 2010 to December 2015). Magin et al (2016) investigated content from political party pages in the four weeks before the 2013 German and Austrian national elections.…”

Quantitative Literacy and Civic Virtue

“…These active users tended to cluster around those news sources with similar content or outlook. The result, according to the report, is a collection of news-sharing communities ("echo chambers" in the words of the report) that are sharply polarized based on news content and opinion (Schmidt et al 2017).…”