Is news sharing on Twitter ideologically biased?

  • Authors:

  • Jonathan Scott Morgan;Cliff Lampe;Muhammad Zubair Shafiq

  • Affiliations:

  • School of Journalism, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, USA;University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA;Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

In this paper we explore effects of perceived ideology of news outlets on consumption and sharing of news in Twitter. Selective exposure theory suggests that when given access to a broad range of information, people will tend to consume and share news that confirms their existing beliefs and biases. We find that users share news in similar ways regardless of outlet or perceived ideology of outlet, and that as a user shares more news content, they tend to quickly include outlets with opposing viewpoints. This suggests that while perceived ideology does not inspire most Twitter users to treat liberal or conservative news outlets differently, it is a factor in their news consumption and sharing. Specifically, users in our sample who sent multiple tweets tended to increase the ideological diversity in news they shared within two or three tweets, and users' information diversity increased as their number of tweets sent increased.