Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook

Facebook Study Says

Users Control What

They See

https://research.fb.com/exposure-to-

diverse-information-on-facebook-2/

EXPOSURE TO IDEOLOGICALLY DIVERSE

NEWS AND OPINION ON FACEBOOK

- Eytan Bakshy , Solomon Messing , Lada Adamic

Presenter: Harshitha Chidananda

CONTENT

• Introduction

• Data

• Process

• Exposure

• Alignment

• Results

• Limitations

• Conclusion

DO YOU CONTROL WHAT YOU SEE ON

FACEBOOK?

INTRODUCTION

• Exposure to news, opinion and civic information through social media

• How do these online networks influence exposure to perspectives that cut across ideological lines?

DATA

• De-identified data

• 10.1 Million accounts

• Active US users

• Self-reported their ideological affiliation

• 7 million weblinks shared over 6-month period

• July 7, 2014 and January 7, 2015

• - Their interaction with socially shared news

• Information Abundance

• While these technologies have the potential to expose individuals to more diverse viewpoints, they also have the

potential to limit exposure to attitude-changing information

• Who they friend and what content they click on are more consequential than the News Feed ranking in terms of

how much diverse content they encounter

FACEBOOK’S CREATION

Echo Chambers

Individuals are exposed only to information from

like-minded individual

FACEBOOK’S CREATION

Echo Chambers

Individuals are exposed only to information from

like-minded individual

Filter Bubbles

Content is selected by algorithms based on a

viewer’s previous behaviors

PROCESS

• Compare ideological diversity of the broad set of

news and opinion shared on Facebook with that

shared by individuals friends network

• Compare this to the subset of stories that appear in

individuals algorithmically-ranked News Feed

• Observe what information individuals choose to

consume, given exposure on News Feed

PROCESS








PROCESS








• Stories classification

• Hard (National news, politics, world affairs)

• Soft ( Sports, entertainment, travel)

• Training a SVM on text features

• 13% Hard content

EXPOSURE

• 226 Thousand distinct hard content URLs

• Shared by at least 20 users

• 3.8 Billion unique potential exposures:

• Cases in which an individual’s friend shared hard content, regardless

of whether it appeared in her News Feed

• 903 million unique exposures

• cases in which a link to the content appears on screen in an

individual’s News Feed

• 59 Million unique clicks

3.8 Billion unique potential

exposures

EXPOSURE









• 59 Million unique clicks

903 million

unique

exposures

EXPOSURE









• 59 million unique clicks

59

million

unique

clicks

ALIGNMENT

• We then obtain a measure of content alignment(A) for each hard story by averaging the ideological affiliation of each user who shared the article.

ALIGNMENT

• We then obtain a measure of content alignment(A) for each hard story by averaging the ideological affiliation of each user who shared the article.

As = +0.80 As = -0.65

“On average, 23 percent of people’s friends claim an opposing political ideology.

Half of users have between 9 and 33

percent of friends from opposing

ideologies

25 percent have less than 9 percent

Remaining 25 percent have more than 33

percent

Among friendships with individuals who

report their ideological affiliation in their

profile

Media proportion of friendships liberals

maintain with conservatives is 0.20,

interquartile range (IQR) [0.09, 0.36].

Similarly, the median proportion of

friendships that conservatives maintain with

liberals is 0.18, IQR [0.09, 0.30]

WHAT APPEARS TO USERS?

Facebook Feed

What their friends share

News Feed ranking algorithm

What individuals choose to read

Facebook feed order

Frequency of visit to Facebook

How much they interact with certain friends?

How often they have clicked on links to certain website in News Feed in the past

Of the hard news content that people’s friends share, 29.5 percent of it cuts across ideological

lines.

When it comes to what people see in the News Feed, 28.5 percent of the hard news encountered

cuts across ideological lines, on average.

24.9 percent of the hard news content that people actually clicked on was cross-cutting.”

How much cross-cutting content

individuals encounter depends on

who their friends are and what

information those friends share.

Liberals tend to be connected to

fewer friends who share information

from the other side, compared to

their conservative counterparts

After algorithmic ranking,

conservatives see 5% less cross-

cutting content compared to what

friends share

Liberals see 8% less ideologically

diverse content

54 percent—more than half—clicked on ideologically cross-cutting content, although less

than the 87 percent who clicked on ideologically aligned content.

LIMITATIONS

Study on facebook

Facebook’s users tend to be younger, more educated, and female, compared to the U.S. population as a whole

Blogs and Twitter, have been shown to exhibit different patterns

Distinction between exposure and consumption is imperfect

Individuals may read the summaries of articles that appear in the News Feed, and therefore be exposed to some

of the articles’ content without clicking through

“FACEBOOK FEED IS DIVERSE”

RETHINKING INFORMATION DIVERSITY IN NETWORK

Information in social media may come from weak

ties as well

Suggests that social media may actually increase the

spread of novel information and diverse viewpoints

CONCLUSION

Facebook Study Says

Users Control What

They See

https://research.fb.com/exposure-to-

diverse-information-on-facebook-2/

THANK YOUQUESTIONS?

We classified stories as either “hard” (e.g., national news, politics,

world affairs), or “soft” content (e.g., sports, entertainment, travel)

by training a support vector machine on unigram, bigram, and

trigram text features

Social Media

Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook