Merten, Lisa; Metoui, Nadia; Makhortykh, Mykola; Trilling, Damian; Möller, Judith (7 September 2021). News won't find me? Exploring inequalities in social media news use with tracking data (Unpublished). In: 8th European Communication Conference (ECREA 2021) - "Communication and trust". Online. 06.09.-09.09.2021.
Access to news and political information is not distributed equally among citizens, but depends on their individual resources and motivations. A rise in the availability of news content on social media over the past decade has been accompanied by a hope that people with lower socioeconomic status and less interest in political affairs would be “accidentally” exposed to news.
In this presentation, based on a unique set of tracking data that combines the prevalence of news content in individual Facebook news feeds with their overall news use online and survey data, we explore whether social media news use is mitigating the divide in news use or if the specificities of social media ecosystems rather accelerate the news gap. We specifically analyzed differences in social media news exposure and consumption related to political interest, education and income. We reconstruct pathways to news holistically from (incidental) exposure on Facebook to the actual consumption of a news item and additional engagement with news after the consumption. Our unique approach in data collection and analysis also allows us to differentiate between the consumption of and additional engagement with a news item accessed via a news website and an item found via social media.
We find that a higher level of political interest is associated with a higher amount of news exposure on Facebook and a higher amount of news items consumed via social media sites but not with a higher amount of news consumption via news websites. The hypothesized positive effects of education and income were not found. When a news item was accessed via a social media, users engaged less often in news-related follow-up behavior than after consuming news item referred via news website. Overall, our results indicate that social media news use seems to occur particularly for those who are already interested in current affairs and makes follow-up consumption less likely.
Item Type: |
Conference or Workshop Item (Speech) |
|---|---|
Division/Institute: |
03 Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Institute of Communication and Media Studies (ICMB) |
UniBE Contributor: |
Makhortykh, Mykola |
Subjects: |
300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology |
Language: |
English |
Submitter: |
Mykola Makhortykh |
Date Deposited: |
04 Oct 2021 14:21 |
Last Modified: |
05 Dec 2022 15:53 |
Uncontrolled Keywords: |
digital news, tracking, information consumption, news consumption, social media, methodology |
URI: |
https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/159630 |
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