Search for: All records

We analyze social media activity during one of the largest protest mobilizations in US history to examine ideological asymmetries in the posting of news content. Using an unprecedented combination of four datasets (tracking offline protests, social media activity, web browsing, and the reliability of news sources), we show that there is no evidence of unreliable sources having any prominent visibility during the protest period, but we do identify asymmetries in the ideological slant of the sources shared on social media, with a clear bias towards right-leaning domains. These results support the “amplification of the right” thesis, which points to the structural conditions (social and technological) that lead to higher visibility of content with a partisan bent towards the right. Our findings provide evidence that right-leaning sources gain more visibility on social media and reveal that ideological asymmetries manifest themselves even in the context of movements with progressive goals.

 

Healthy news consumption requires limited exposure to unreliable content and ideological diversity in the sources consumed. There are two challenges to this normative expectation: the prevalence of unreliable content online; and the prominence of misinformation within individual news diets. Here, we assess these challenges using an observational panel tracking the browsing behavior of N ≈ 140,000 individuals in the United States for 12 months (January–December 2018). Our results show that panelists who are exposed to misinformation consume more reliable news and from a more ideologically diverse range of sources. In other words, exposure to unreliable content is higher among the better informed. This association persists after we control for partisan leaning and consider inter- and intra-person variation. These findings highlight the tension between the positive and negative consequences of increased exposure to news content online.