title: Political science. Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook.
abstract: Exposure to news, opinion, and civic information increasingly occurs through social media. How do these online networks influence exposure to perspectives that cut across ideological lines? Using deidentified data, we examined how 10.1 million U.S. Facebook users interact with socially shared news. We directly measured ideological homophily in friend networks and examined the extent to which heterogeneous friends could potentially expose individuals to cross-cutting content. We then quantified the extent to which individuals encounter comparatively more or less diverse content while interacting via Facebook's algorithmically ranked News Feed and further studied users' choices to click through to ideologically discordant content. Compared with algorithmic ranking, individuals' choices played a stronger role in limiting exposure to cross-cutting content.
authors.affiliation: Facebook, Menlo Park, CA 94025, USA. ebakshy@fb.com.
authors.forename: Eytan
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Bakshy
authors.affiliation: Facebook, Menlo Park, CA 94025, USA.
authors.forename: Solomon
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Messing
authors.affiliation: Facebook, Menlo Park, CA 94025, USA. School of Information, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA.
authors.forename: Lada A
authors.initials: LA
authors.lastname: Adamic
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D018864:Cultural Diversity; D033062:Friends / Q000523:psychology; D006801:Humans; D033183:Interdisciplinary Communication; D011057:Politics; D061108:Social Media