Asymmetric Ideological Segregation In Exposure To Political News on Facebook

Journal Article

By analyzing a collection of Facebook data gathered during the US 2020 election, we compared how exposure to political news on users' feeds is affected by algorithmic curation.

Citation

González-Bailón, Sandra, David Lazer, Pablo Barberá, Meiqing Zhang, Hunt Alcott, Taylor Brown, Adriana Crespo-Tenorio, et al. "Asymmetric ideological segregation in exposure to political news on Facebook." Science 381, 392-398 (2023). DOI:10.1126/science.ade7138

Date Posted

Jul 27, 2023

Authors

  • Sandra González-Bailón, 
  • David Lazer, 
  • Pablo Barberá, 
  • Meiqing Zhang, 
  • Hunt Alcott, 
  • Taylor Brown, 
  • Adriana Crespo-Tenorio, 
  • Deen Freelon, 
  • Matthew Gentzkow, 
  • Andrew M. Guess, 
  • Shanto Iyengar, 
  • Young Mie Kim, 
  • Neil Malhotra, 
  • Devra Moehler, 
  • Brendan Nyhan, 
  • Jennifer Pan, 
  • Caros Velasco Rivera, 
  • Jaime Settle, 
  • Emily Thorson, 
  • Rebekah Tromble, 
  • Arjun Wilkins, 
  • Magdalena Wojcieszak, 
  • Chad Kiewiet De Jong, 
  • Annie Franco, 
  • Winter Mason, 
  • Joshua A. Tucker, 
  • Natalie Jomini Stroud

Area of Study

Tags

Read the full article

Abstract

Does Facebook enable ideological segregation in political news consumption? We analyzed exposure to news during the US 2020 election using aggregated data for 208 million US Facebook users. We compared the inventory of all political news that users could have seen in their feeds with the information that they saw (after algorithmic curation) and the information with which they engaged. We show that (i) ideological segregation is high and increases as we shift from potential exposure to actual exposure to engagement; (ii) there is an asymmetry between conservative and liberal audiences, with a substantial corner of the news ecosystem consumed exclusively by conservatives; and (iii) most misinformation, as identified by Meta’s Third-Party Fact-Checking Program, exists within this homogeneously conservative corner, which has no equivalent on the liberal side. Sources favored by conservative audiences were more prevalent on Facebook’s news ecosystem than those favored by liberals.

If you have trouble accessing this article at Science, please email us at csmap@nyu.edu.

View More Research