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Using Social Media Appears to Diversify Your News Diet, Not Narrow It
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Using Social Media Appears to Diversify Your News Diet, Not Narrow It


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8

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  • Scientific
  • Eye Opening

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Political commentators have blamed Donald Trump’s surprise victory and the United Kingdom’s Brexit vote at least partially on the “echo chamber” effect: Algorithms customize what people see online to the extent that they only see confirmations of what they believe or think they know. However, as Richard Fletcher and Rasmus Nielsen, two researchers at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, point out, their survey data don’t bear out the argument that social media use shelters people from alternative opinions. Their research instead suggests that social media expose people to a diversity of news sources even if they don’t care about the news. getAbstract recommends Fletcher and Neilsen’s analysis to media professionals, polling experts and Internet activists.

Take-Aways

  • Internet activists warn that the use of social media and personalized online platforms insulates people from political opinions other than their own.
  • Furthermore, scholars of the Internet argue that personalized search algorithms prevent people from coming across news articles incidentally.
  • However, recent data suggest that the news diet of social media users is more diverse than that of Internet users not on social media.

About the Authors

Richard Fletcher and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen are researchers at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford.


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    L. R. 7 years ago
    these are very weak claims. Who is a non social media user nowadays? Very little percent and mostly elderly people, I bet. There are confounder variables, and of course using social media exposes you to a greater variety of everything than non social media users...