Reason.com - Free Minds and Free Markets
Reason logo Reason logo
  • Latest
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Archives
    • Subscribe
    • Crossword
  • Video
  • Podcasts
    • All Shows
    • The Reason Roundtable
    • The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie
    • The Soho Forum Debates
    • Just Asking Questions
    • The Best of Reason Magazine
    • Why We Can't Have Nice Things
  • Volokh
  • Newsletters
  • Donate
    • Donate Online
    • Donate Crypto
    • Ways To Give To Reason Foundation
    • Torchbearer Society
    • Planned Giving
  • Subscribe
    • Reason Plus Subscription
    • Print Subscription
    • Gift Subscriptions
    • Subscriber Support

Login Form

Create new account
Forgot password

Social Media

Social Media Users Encounter More, Not Less, Political Diversity

Our media consumption is increasingly personalized. But personalized does not mean isolated.

Jesse Walker | 7.11.2017 4:15 PM

Share on FacebookShare on XShare on RedditShare by emailPrint friendly versionCopy page URL
Media Contact & Reprint Requests
Large image on homepages | Berkeley Breathed
(Berkeley Breathed)
Berkeley Breathed

If you use social media, you're more likely to get your news from more than one political perspective, according to a study by the Oxford-based researchers Richard Fletcher and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen.

This flies in the face of the accepted wisdom that says the internet segregates society into ever more cloistered communities of like-minded people. Ideological bubbles are real, but ideological bubbles have always been real; they may well be more permeable now than in the past.

If you regularly read this website, you're probably a "news user"—one of the three groups Fletcher and Nielsen identify in a YouGov survey of internet users around the globe. News users go online for the express purpose of reading about current events.

The second group is the "non-users." These are the people who avoid social media altogether. And somewhere in the middle there are the "incidentally exposed": people who use social media for nonpolitical purposes, but could conceivably come across a news story anyway. Think of someone who visits Facebook to stay in touch with friends but might click on a news story that comes up in the feed.

Fletcher and Nielsen zero in on data from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany in a write-up of their findings at the Nieman Journalism Lab. As you might expect, news users drew on more media sources than anyone else.

In America, for example, they reported reading or viewing stories from an average of 5.16 different sources in the previous week. The incidentally exposed group, in turn, drew on more sources (an average of 3.29) than the people who didn't use social media at all (an average of just 1.8).

"These differences remain statistically significant after controlling for a range of demographic and news attitude variables," the authors note.

Needless to say, not everyone who looks at more than one news site is looking at sites from more than one point of view. But if you use social media, you're much more likely to take in sources from multiple perspectives. This chart shows the percentage of each group that used both at least one source from the left and at least one source from the right:

Nieman Journalism Lab

As you can see, most Americans don't look at stories from more than one political perspective. But people who are on social media clearly tend to have a more diverse news diet than people who aren't.

Bonus link: For more on this theme, check out my review of Eli Pariser's book The Filter Bubble. Here's an excerpt:

Yes, our media consumption is increasingly personalized. But personalized does not mean isolated. Pariser imagines the Internet becoming a stagnant "city of ghettoes" where "connections and overlap between communities" disappear. But how many people belong to just one online community? A personalized Internet is an Internet geared toward your particular combination of interests, and therefore to your particular combination of human networks. If you're a Methodist Democrat in South Baltimore who watches birds, follows basketball, and loves Elvis, you might be in touch online with people who share your faith but not your politics, and vice versa; your neighborhood but not your hobby, and vice versa; your taste in sports but not in music, and vice versa. That isn't a city of ghettoes. It's a city of crossroads.

And while there may be many good reasons to hate Facebook, an insufficient diversity of views isn't one of them. One of the chief effects of using the site, after all, is to discover your friends' horrifying opinions.

Start your day with Reason. Get a daily brief of the most important stories and trends every weekday morning when you subscribe to Reason Roundup.

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

NEXT: Connecticut to Require Convictions Before Trying to Seize and Keep People's Property

Books Editor Jesse Walker is the author of Rebels on the Air and The United States of Paranoia.

Social MediaInternetJournalismFree SpeechTechnology
Share on FacebookShare on XShare on RedditShare by emailPrint friendly versionCopy page URL
Media Contact & Reprint Requests

Show Comments (39)

Latest

The FTC's Probe Into 'Potentially Illegal' Content Moderation Is a Blatant Assault on the First Amendment

Jacob Sullum | 5.21.2025 3:15 PM

Antitrust Remedies Against Google Would Punish Consumers, Not Protect Them

Jennifer Huddleston | 5.21.2025 3:00 PM

Report: 50 Venezuelans Sent to Salvadoran Prison Entered the U.S. Legally, Contrary to White House Claims

C.J. Ciaramella | 5.21.2025 1:34 PM

New Orleans Police Secretly Used Prohibited Facial Recognition Surveillance for Years

Autumn Billings | 5.21.2025 1:05 PM

A 10-Year Pause on State AI Laws Is the Smart Move

Kevin Frazier | 5.21.2025 12:50 PM

Recommended

  • About
  • Browse Topics
  • Events
  • Staff
  • Jobs
  • Donate
  • Advertise
  • Subscribe
  • Contact
  • Media
  • Shop
  • Amazon
Reason Facebook@reason on XReason InstagramReason TikTokReason YoutubeApple PodcastsReason on FlipboardReason RSS

© 2024 Reason Foundation | Accessibility | Privacy Policy | Terms Of Use

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

r

Do you care about free minds and free markets? Sign up to get the biggest stories from Reason in your inbox every afternoon.

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

This modal will close in 10

Reason Plus

Special Offer!

  • Full digital edition access
  • No ads
  • Commenting privileges

Just $25 per year

Join Today!