Lisa Merten and an international team of authors have published the article "News Won't Find Me? Exploring Inequalities in Social Media News Use With Tracking Data" open access in the International Journal Of Communication. The authors use a combination of tracking and survey data to analyse how political interest, income and education influence news exposure and consumption in social media.
Article as pdf (open access)
Abstract
The rise of news content on social media has been accompanied by a hope that people with lower socioeconomic status and less interest in political affairs would be “accidentally” exposed to news. By combining tracking and survey data from a Dutch online panel (N = 413), we analyze how political interest, income, and education influence social media news exposure and consumption. Higher levels of political interest are associated with higher amounts of news exposure on Facebook and more news items consumed via social media. Users engage less often in news-related follow-up behavior after consuming news items via social media than after consuming news items referred via news websites. If social media news use seems to occur particularly for those who are already interested in current affairs and makes follow-up consumption less likely, the specificities of the social media ecosystems might accelerate rather than level inequalities in news use.
Merten, L., Metoui, N., Makhortykh, M., Trilling, D., & Moeller, J. (2022): News Won’t Find Me? Exploring Inequalities in Social Media News Use With Tracking Data. International Journal of Communication, 16, 21.
What did we do?
We technically captured/measured the browsing behaviour and nature of the Facebook news feed of Dutch citizens (N = 413) using a browser add-on to analyse how political interest, education and income are related to news exposure (seeing news) and news consumption (clicking on news) on social media and news websites.
What did we find out?
Higher political interest is associated with higher news exposure on Facebook (newsfeed data) and higher news consumption via social media (web tracking data: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.).
After consuming news articles via social media, users are less likely to engage in news-related follow-up behaviour - such as reading, clicking on another article or searching for news - than after consuming news articles they found through the traditional route, via news websites.
What does it mean?
It suggests that the specifics of the social media ecosystem (algorithmic filtering, social inclusion, and personalisation) reinforce rather than compensate for the inequalities in news use and knowledge acquisition that also exist offline and in the "old" online news sources if citizens who are already interested in current affairs consume news. More specifically, those citizens who see (expose) and click on (consume) news on social media - and who will less likely consume news subsequently after being in contact with this type of news than when accessing news websites.
What needs to be considered (limitations)?
We worked with a very innovative methodological approach combining tracking, newsfeed and survey data. However, our sample is small and while comparable, not representative of the composition of the Dutch population. We had no measurement data on mobile online and app usage, only desktop devices.
The article was written in close cooperation with the University of Amsterdam.
