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Exposure to Diverse Information

on Facebook
by Eytan Bakshy, Solomon Messing, Lada Adamic 8

1,025

As people increasingly turn to social networks for news and civic

information, questions have been raised about whether this practice
leads to the creation of echo chambers, in which people are exposed
only to information from like-minded individuals [2]. Other speculation
has focused on whether algorithms used to rank search results and
social media posts could create filter bubbles, in which only
ideologically appealing content is surfaced [3].
Research we have conducted to date, however, runs counter to this
picture. A previous 2012 research paper concluded that much of the
information we are exposed to and share comes from weak ties:
those friends we interact with less often and are more likely to be
dissimilar to us than our close friends [4]. Separate research suggests
that individuals are more likely to engage with content contrary
to their own views when it is presented along with social information
[5].
Our latest research, released today in Science, quantifies, for the first
time, exactly how much individuals could be and are exposed to
ideologically diverse news and information in social media [1].
We found that people have friends who claim an opposing political
ideology, and that the content in peoples' News Feeds reflect those

diverse views. While News Feed surfaces content that is slightly more
aligned with an individual's own ideology (based on that person's
actions on Facebook), 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.
Specifically, we find that among those who self-report a liberal or
conservative affiliation,
On average, 23 percent of people's friends claim an opposing
political ideology.
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.

Sharing news on Facebook

During the six months between July 2014 and January 2015, more
than 7 million distinct Web links (URLs) were shared by people on
Facebook in the United States. We were interested in learning how
much people were exposed to hard news stories about politics,
world affairs, and the economy, rather than soft news stories
about entertainment, celebrities, and sports and whether this
information was aligned primarily with liberal or conservative
audiences. To do this, we trained a support vector machine classifier
which uses the first few words of articles linked for each URL shared
on Facebook. This allowed us to identify more than 226,000 unique
hard news articles that had been shared at least 100 times.
Next, we characterized the content as either conservative or liberal.
Nine percent of Facebook users in the United States self-report their

political affiliation on their profiles. We mapped the most common

affiliations to a five-point scale ranging from -2 (very liberal) to 2 (very
conservative). By averaging the affiliations of those who shared each
article, we could measure the ideological alignment of each story. To
be clear, this score is a measure of the *ideological alignment of the
audience* *who shares an article*, and is not a measure of political
bias or slant of the article. This calculation is described in the
illustration below.

Illustration of how ideological alignment for content is measured. For

each shared item, we average the political affiliation of individuals
who share. For example, in the left most example above, the article
was shared by five people, three whom identified themselves as
liberals, one as a moderate, and one as conservative, producing an
average of -2/5.
When we average this measure for every story from a particular
website domain, we can see key differences in well-known
ideologically-aligned media sources: FoxNews.com is aligned with
conservatives (As = +.80), while HuffingtonPost.com is aligned with
liberals (As = -.65). There was substantial polarization among hard
news shared on Facebook, with the most frequently shared links
clearly aligned with largely liberal or conservative populations, as
shown below.

This figure shows that most links to particular hard news articles are
shared either primarily by liberals (alignment score close to -1) or by
conservatives (alignment score close to +1) but rarely by both
equally.
Using the methods described above, we turned toward measuring the
extent to which people could be, and are exposed to ideologically
diverse information on Facebook.

Network structure and ideology

Homophily, the tendency for similar individuals to associate with each
other (birds of a feather flock together,) is a robust social
phenomenon. Friends are more likely to be similar in age, educational
attainment, occupation, and geography. It is not surprising to find that
the same holds true for political affiliation on Facebook. We can see
how liberals and conservatives tend to connect to people with similar
political affiliations based on sample ego-networks depicted in the
visualizations below.

Example social networks for a liberal, a moderate, and a

conservative. Points are individuals' friends, and lines designate
friendships between them.*
However, among those who report their ideology, on average, about
23 percent of their friends report an affiliation on the opposite side of
the ideological spectrum. From the figure below, we can see that there
is a wide range of network diversity. Half of users have between
between 9 and 33 percent of friends from opposing ideologies, while
25 percent have less than 9 percent and the remaining 25 percent
have more than 33 percent.

Percent of friends from opposing ideologies among liberals and

conservatives.

The flow of information on Facebook

The diversity of content people encounter depends not only on who
their friends are, but also what information those friends share, and
the interaction between people and Facebook's News Feed. News
Feed shows you all of the content shared by your friends, but the most
relevant content is shown first. Exactly what stories people click on
depends on how often they use Facebook, how far down they scroll in
the News Feed, and the choices they make about what to read.

Illustration of how the exposure process consists of three phases: (1)

the news your friends share (Potential from network), (2) ranking and
the time that individuals take to scroll governs what they see in their
News Feeds (Exposed), (3) clicking through to actual article
(Selected).
How much cross-cutting content people encounter depends on who
their friends are and what information those friends share. If people
were to acquire information from random others, approximately 45
percent of the content liberals would be exposed to would be cross
cutting, compared to 40 percent for conservatives. Of course,
individuals do not encounter information at random in offline
environments nor on the Internet.
How much of the cross-cutting content shared by your friends appears
in News Feed? People are eligible to see all of the content shared by
their friends in News Feed, but since people don't have enough time in

the day to see everything, we sort the content to show people what is
most relevant to them. We found that 23 percent of news shared by
liberals friends is cross-cutting, whereas what is seen in the News
Feed is 22 percent. This corresponds to a risk ratio of 8 percent,
meaning that people were 8 percent less likely to see countervailing
articles that have been shared by friends, compared to the likelihood
of seeing ideologically consistent articles that have been shared by
friends. On the other hand, 34 percent of the content shared by
conservatives is ideologically cross-cutting, versus 33 percent actually
seen in the News Feed, corresponding to a risk ratio of 5 percent.
How much cross-cutting content that appears in News Feed do people
actually click on? While 22 percent of the content seen by liberals was
cross-cutting, we found that 20 percent of the content they actually
clicked on was cross-cutting (meaning people are 6 percent less likely
to click on countervailing articles that appeared in their News Feed,
compared to the likelihood of seeing ideologically consistent articles
that appeared in their News Feed). Conservatives saw 33 percent of
cross-cutting content in News Feed but actually clicked on 29 percent
(corresponding to a risk ratio of 17 percent).

The diversity of content (1) shared by random others (random), (2)

shared by friends (potential from network), (3) actually appearing in
peoples News Feeds (exposed), (4) clicked on (selected).
When we look at people on the margin of encountering hard news
on Facebook, we see more evidence of the important role individual
choice plays. Take people whose friends shared at least one
consistent and one cross-cutting story --- 99 percent of them were
exposed to at least one ideologically aligned item, and 96 percent
encountered at least one ideologically cross-cutting item in News
Feed. When we looked at who clicked through to hard news content,
we found that 54 percent---more than half---clicked on ideologically
cross-cutting content, although less than the 87 percent who clicked
on ideologically aligned content.

Proportion of individuals with at least one cross-cutting and aligned

story (1) shared by friends (potential), (2) actually appearing in
peoples News Feeds (exposed) (3) clicked on (selected).*

Discussion
By showing that people are exposed to a substantial amount of
content from friends with opposing viewpoints, our findings contrast
concerns that people might list and speak only to the like-minded
while online [2]. The composition of our social networks is the most
important factor affecting the mix of content encountered on social
media with individual choice also playing a large role. News Feed
ranking has a smaller impact on the diversity of information we see
from the other side.
We believe that this work is just the beginning of a long line of
research into how people are exposed to and consume media online.
For more information, see our paper, which is available on open
access at ScienceExpress:
Exposure to Ideologically Diverse News and Opinion. E. Bakshy, S.