News Won’t Find Me? Exploring Inequalities in Social Media News Use With Tracking Data

Authors

  • Lisa Merten Leibniz Institute for Media Research | Hans Bredow Institute
  • Nadia Metoui Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management at Delft University of Technology
  • Mykola Makhortykh Institute of Media and Communication Studies at University of Bern
  • Damian Trilling Amsterdam School of Communication Research at University of Amsterdam
  • Judith Moeller Amsterdam School of Communication Research at University of Amsterdam

Keywords:

social media, news consumption, political interest, computational methods, survey, digital divide

Abstract

The rise of news content on social media has been accompanied by a hope that people with lower socioeconomic status and less interest in political affairs would be “accidentally” exposed to news. By combining tracking and survey data from a Dutch online panel (N = 413), we analyze how political interest, income, and education influence social media news exposure and consumption. Higher levels of political interest are associated with higher amounts of news exposure on Facebook and more news items consumed via social media. Users engage less often in news-related follow-up behavior after consuming news items via social media than after consuming news items referred via news websites. If social media news use seems to occur particularly for those who are already interested in current affairs and makes follow-up consumption less likely, the specificities of the social media ecosystems might accelerate rather than level inequalities in news use.

Author Biographies

Lisa Merten, Leibniz Institute for Media Research | Hans Bredow Institute

Lisa Merten is a researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Media Research | Hans-Bredow-Institut in Hamburg, Germany. Her research interests include news consumption and customization in digital environments and the consequences of these practices for the public sphere.

Nadia Metoui, Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management at Delft University of Technology

Nadia Metoui is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management at Delft University of Technology. Her research interests include privacy in the digital society and the technologies, effects, and ethical implications of Artificial Intelligence in politics, health, media, and commerce.

Mykola Makhortykh, Institute of Media and Communication Studies at University of Bern

Mykola Makhortykh is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Bern. His research interests include personalization of news media, algorithmic biases in news consumption and interactions between social media and propaganda and digital remembrance.

Damian Trilling, Amsterdam School of Communication Research at University of Amsterdam

Damian Trilling is an associate professor at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research at the University of Amsterdam. His research interests include use and effects of personalised media use, news sharing and information diffusion and methodological innovations in computational social science.

Judith Moeller, Amsterdam School of Communication Research at University of Amsterdam

Judith Möller is an assistant professor at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research at the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests include political socialisation, effects of political communication, processes of attitude formation and the affordances of political information use online.

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Published

2022-02-11

Issue

Vol. 16 (2022)

Section

Articles

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