Explaining Online News Engagement Based on Browsing Behavior: Creatures of Habit?

Moeller, Judith; Velde, R.N. van de; Merten, L.; Puschmann, Cornelius

doi:10.1177/0894439319828012

Cited by 94 publications

(93 citation statements)

References 40 publications

(43 reference statements)

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“…The resulting levels are "Low education," "Intermediate education," and "High education." In line with theories of attitude polarization and selective exposure, people with more extreme ideological leanings might be more prone to engage in selective exposure (Fawzi 2019;Möller et al 2019). Political extremism could also be correlated with populist attitudes, which are a phenomenon that goes beyond left and right ideological leanings ( Van Hauwaert and Van Kessel 2018).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 77%

Populist Attitudes and Selective Exposure to Online News: A Cross-Country Analysis Combining Web Tracking and Surveys

Stier

Kirkizh

Froio

et al. 2020

The International Journal of Press/Politics

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Research has shown that citizens with populist attitudes evaluate the news media more negatively, and there is also suggestive evidence that they rely less on established news sources like the legacy press. However, due to data limitations, there is still no solid evidence whether populist citizens have skewed news diets in the contemporary high-choice digital media environment. In this paper, we rely on the selective exposure framework and investigate the relationship between populist attitudes and the consumption of various types of online news. To test our theoretical assumptions, we link 150 million Web site visits by 7,729 Internet users in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States to their responses in an online survey. This design allows us to measure media exposure more precisely than previous studies while linking these data to demographic attributes and political attitudes of participants. The results show that populist attitudes leave pronounced marks in people's news diets, but the evidence is heterogeneous and highly contingent on the supply side of a country's media system. Most importantly, citizens with populist attitudes visit less Web sites from the legacy press, while consuming more hyperpartisan news. Despite these tendencies, the Web tracking data show that populist citizens still primarily get their news from established sources. We

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 77%

Populist Attitudes and Selective Exposure to Online News: A Cross-Country Analysis Combining Web Tracking and Surveys

Stier

Kirkizh

Froio

et al. 2020

The International Journal of Press/Politics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…For example, one study showed that SNS users consumed almost twice the number of news outlets in the previous week as did nonusers (2). Similar results emerged regarding the use of web aggregators (portals) and search engines, although people may use search engines in a more goal-driven fashion compared to SNS (1).…”

mentioning

confidence: 87%

“…news exposure | online media use | web tracking data P eople can come across news and other internet offerings in a variety of ways, for example, by visiting their favorite websites, using search engines, or following recommendations from contacts on social media (1). These routes do not necessarily lead people to the same venues.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

How social network sites and other online intermediaries increase exposure to news

Scharkow

Mangold

Stier

et al. 2020

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

125

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Research has prominently assumed that social media and web portals that aggregate news restrict the diversity of content that users are exposed to by tailoring news diets toward the users’ preferences. In our empirical test of this argument, we apply a random-effects within–between model to two large representative datasets of individual web browsing histories. This approach allows us to better encapsulate the effects of social media and other intermediaries on news exposure. We find strong evidence that intermediaries foster more varied online news diets. The results call into question fears about the vanishing potential for incidental news exposure in digital media environments.

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“…Consequently, Google has been named the most important online source of (political) information by German online users (Stark, Magin, & Jürgens, 2017). Furthermore, informational search engine queries were found to be the most common gateway to online news in a recent tracking study of Dutch online users (Möller, van de Velde, Merten, & Puschmann, 2019). Thus, search engines may be considered a decisive factor in political opinion formation and, subsequently, voting intentions.…”

Section: Use Of Search Engines In Political Information and Voting Bementioning

confidence: 99%

Googling Politics: Parties, Sources, and Issue Ownerships on Google in the 2017 German Federal Election Campaign

Unkel

Haim

2019

Social Science Computer Review

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Democratic election campaigns require informed citizens. Yet, while the Internet allows for broader information through greater media choices, algorithmic filters, such as search engines, threaten to unobtrusively shape individual information repertoires. The purpose of this article is to analyze what search results people encounter when they employ various information orientations, and how these results reflect people’s attributions of issue ownership. A multimethod approach was applied during the 2017 German Federal Election campaign. First, human search behavior depicting various information orientations was simulated using agent-based testing to derive real search results from Google Search, which were then manually coded to identify information sources and ascribe issue ownerships. Second, a survey asked participants about which issues they attribute to which party. We find that search results originated mainly from established news outlets and reflected existing power relations between political parties. However, issue-ownership attributions of the survey participants were reflected poorly in the search results. In total, the results indicate that the fear of algorithmic constraints in the context of online search might be overrated. Instead, our findings (1) suggest that political actors still fail to claim their core issues among political search results, (2) highlight that news media (and thus existing media biases) feature heavily among search results, and (3) call for more media literacy among search engine users.

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Explaining Online News Engagement Based on Browsing Behavior: Creatures of Habit?

Cited by 94 publications

References 40 publications

Populist Attitudes and Selective Exposure to Online News: A Cross-Country Analysis Combining Web Tracking and Surveys

Populist Attitudes and Selective Exposure to Online News: A Cross-Country Analysis Combining Web Tracking and Surveys

How social network sites and other online intermediaries increase exposure to news

Googling Politics: Parties, Sources, and Issue Ownerships on Google in the 2017 German Federal Election Campaign

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