Media Choice and Moderation:

Evidence from Online Tracking Data

Andrew M. Guess
September 6, 2016

Abstract
How prevalent is selective exposure online? This is the first study of online media consumption to combine large-N passive tracking data with individual-level political variables on a representative cross-section of Americans. I find that most people across the political spectrum have
relatively centrist media diets, composed largely of mainstream portals such as CNN.com. There
is a substantial degree of overlap (55.5%) in the hard news consumption habits of Democrats
and Republicans. However, a distinct subgroup, concentrated among those who identify as very
conservative, appears to primarily visit websites on the right end of the ideological spectrum. I
then extend this powerful empirical approach by testing how exogenous changes in the real-world
political environment affect the types of sources people use to learn about the news. I do this in
two ways: first, by deploying an online field experiment about a novel political issue, and second,
by exploiting revelations about a major potential scandal that emerged during data collection. In
doing so, I explore the mechanisms of information search underlying the unique observational
portrait this approach enables. Theoretically, I outline a distinction between active and passive search and show that engaging in more purposeful political media consumption can result in
either polarization or moderation, depending on the context.

Job Market Paper

Latest version: bit.ly/AGuessJMP

This study has been approved by the New York University Institutional Review Board (IRB-FY2016-1342). I would
like to thank Noah Buckley, Alex Coppock, Pat Egan, Albert Fang, Don Green, Trish Kirkland, Jeff Lax, Lucas Leemann,
Jonathan Nagler, Markus Prior, Robert Shapiro, Gaurav Sood, Lauren Young, and seminar participants at the Columbia
University Department of Political Science, the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania,
and the NYU Center for Data Science for extremely helpful comments and suggestions. I also benefited from comments by
discussants and attendees at the 2016 Southern Political Science Association and Midwest Political Science Association
annual meetings and the 2016 Political Communication Pre-conference at Temple University. Special thanks to Doug
Rivers, Brian Law, and Joe Williams at YouGov for facilitating access to the Pulse data. Some of the analysis was made
possible by High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters at Columbia University and New York University.

Postdoctoral Fellow, Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) Lab, New York University. Email:
guess@nyu.edu; web: andyguess.com

Introduction
When it comes to political content, people choose what they like. This simple claim forms the core of
more than a half-decade of social science research on selectivity in exposure to news about politics.
Uniting this broad array of scholarship is a longstanding concern: that people, always seeking reinforcement, prefer to wall themselves off from contradictory sources of information. This has remained
a constant even as the underlying worries change with the times, from the influence of propaganda
(Lazarsfeld, Berelson and Gaudet 1944; Berelson, Lazarsfeld and McPhee 1954; Klapper 1960), to
the dominance of commercial imperatives (Katz 1996), to the rise of cable television (Jamieson and
Cappella 2008; Arceneaux and Johnson 2013), the spread of the Internet (Valentino et al. 2009; Garrett 2009), and most recently, the ubiquity of online social media (Messing and Westwood 2012;
Bakshy, Messing and Adamic 2015).
New technological developments have a tendency to refocus attention on the age-old question of
democratic competence: To what extent do citizens meet the basic prerequisites for informed collective decision-making? Theorists and political scientists alike, especially within the deliberative
tradition, hold that a critical precondition is exposure to competing viewpoints (Downs 1957; Habermas 1984; Fishkin 1991; Mutz 2006; Shapiro 2013). Others further emphasize the importance of
shared experiences within a polity (e.g., Sunstein 2007). Both conditions implicate the quality and
availability of information about public affairs.
Today, people increasingly find (or avoid) such information online. According to the Pew Research Center, in 2013 82% of Americans said they received news on a computer, and over half (54%)
did so on a mobile device (Pew 2014). While online media are not yet the primary source of political information for most Americans, they are for the youngest age groups, and the upward trend
continues. As websites, social media platforms, and mobile devices become the dominant mode of
news delivery, the range of available sources continues to multiply. Early observers of the internets
impact on society saw this proliferation of choice as fundamental to its transformative power, but they
split between near-utopian visions of a global village without boundaries and gloomy predictions
of cyber-balkanization (Negroponte 1995; Van Alstyne and Brynjolfsson 2005; Benkler 2006).
2

Left

Left

Right

Right

Media Slant

Media Slant

Figure 1: Two hypotheses about online media consumption, shown as idealized probability densities.
Left: the global village; right: twin echo chambers.
The pessimistic view is now far more prevalent. In the worst-case scenario, most forcefully articulated in the context of the 21st-century fragmented media environment by Sunstein (2007), people
elect to consume only ideologically congenial information (the Daily Me), resulting in an echochamber effect and, ultimately, increasing polarization. Others have additionally worried that hidden
algorithms could speed along this process by replicating and reinforcing peoples preferences on social media without their knowledge (Pariser 2011). This is exemplified by frequent lamentations in
the popular press about the ideological cocooning of America via social media.1
Employing a unique combination of individual-level media consumption data, exogenous variation in the political environment, and text analysis of millions of web pages, I demonstrate that this
widely shared characterization is exaggerated. Instead, the picture is overwhelmingly one of moderation: The media diets of liberals and conservatives (or Democrats and Republicans) overlap a
majority of the time and center around the middle of the ideological spectrum. This pattern is largely
driven by the dominance of mainstream, relatively centrist websitesthe kinds of general-interest

See, e.g., http://graphics.wsj.com/blue-feed-red-feed/ for a recent example.

intermediaries Sunstein and others hope to preserve (Shapiro 1999). However, an important qualification to this finding is a nexus of conservative media outlets visited primarily by those who describe
themselves as very conservative (e.g., Jamieson and Cappella 2008).
I further explore the dynamics underlying this overall portrait by conducting an online experiment
and then by taking advantage of a unique quasi-experiment that occurred during data collection: the
revelation of Hillary Clintons use of a private email server while Secretary of State. Together, the
results of these analyses show that peoples online media diets are structured by defaults and shortcuts
that, depending on the circumstances, can encourage either balance or ideological bias. Overall,
however, peoples media consumption habits are remarkably stable, and while there is a correlation
between individuals ideological predispositions and the overall political slant of their media diets,
this correlation is quite small.
In the next section, I briefly discuss how my research approach addresses many of the well-known
methodological difficulties of studying selective exposure. Then, before proceeding to an overview
of the data and research design, I develop a theoretical framework that specifies how the structure of
the online media environment can make selectivity in exposure to information more or less prevalent.
I draw a distinction between active and passive forms of information search and argue that actively
seeking out political information can result in different patterns of consumption depending on the
nature of the task. I then present the results in three separate sections and conclude with a discussion.

Methodological Challenges
Since the critical review of Sears and Freedman (1967), skeptics have questioned whether people are
as selective in their choices of how to receive information as previously supposed. More recently,
advances in measurement and data collection have backed up some of these claims. For instance,
Gentzkow and Shapiro (2011) use web traffic data to conclude that online ideological segregation
an aggregate measure of political isolation in news consumption patternsis less severe than for
national newspapers or in face-to-face social networks. On Twitter, Barber (2014) uses panel data to
4

show evidence of cross-cutting follow patterns that lead to moderation rather than polarization. And
using data on the web browsing history of a sample of Bing Toolbar users, Flaxman, Goel and Rao
(2016) find that social media and search engines can drive ideological diversity in exposure to online
news.
This body of work sits alongside research uncovering some evidence of selective exposure in
relatively high-choice media environments. Prior (2007) shows that the presence of entertainment
options allow people to tune out of political programming altogether. Using a a simulated online
environment, Garrett (2009) finds selectivity among subjects recruited from partisan websites but finds
more of a preference for reinforcing content than an aversion to challenging information. A number
of other innovative studies incorporate unobtrusive measurement into designs that focus subjects
attention on seemingly unrelated tasks, such as clicking through a CD-ROM with candidate issue
positions (Iyengar et al. 2008) or browsing through magazines in a waiting room (Stroud 2011), to
test for correlations with political predispositions or other preferences over content. All of these
effects are relatively modest. Other studies experimentally manipulate source labels in order to test
for revealed preferences (e.g., Iyengar and Hahn 2009). Finally, not all positive evidence arises in
controlled settings: In a study that helped to reinvigorate the study of selective exposure, Stroud
(2008) used panel data to show an increasing association between political beliefs and news choices
across a variety of media, including online sources.
The conflicting findings arise partially from the many difficulties inherent to the study of selective
exposure. One of these is simply that researchers are aiming at a moving target. But even within a
given mediumsuch as the focus of this paper, news sources on the web accessed from laptops or
desktop computersthere are mixed results. The first main reason is that there is reason to believe that
errors in survey-based measures of exposure to media content are correlated with political identities,
which could in turn exaggerate evidence for selectivity. As Prior (2013b) argues, Taking self-reports
at face value requires the assumption that the very few people who follow their wishful thinking when
they evaluate economic performance or perceive centrist news as biased faithfully report when they
turn off the pro-attitudinal message stream or follow counter-attitudinal programming. Guess (2015)
5

provides evidence that the most commonly used survey-based self-report measures are inaccurate in
the context of online political media. Both authors instead recommend the use of direct, behavioral
measures of media exposure via passive metering technologies (Prior 2013a; Guess 2015).
Second, it is hard to disentangle what Freedman and Sears (1965, p. 61) referred to as de facto
selective exposure from a conscious, psychological preference for congenial material. As they and
subsequent scholars have suggested, apparent correlations between peoples political predispositions
and the ideological content of the information they are exposed to could be driven by a number of
situational factors. For example, someone who grew up in a liberal city would likely be surrounded by
relatively left-leaning material, whether in conversation, on television or on newsstands. This would
be true regardless of whether the person actively seeks out such content. An internet-age analogue
to this dynamic would be an individual working in finance who reads The Wall Street Journal online
for stock listings and comes into contact with conservative views as a result. Messing and Westwood
(2012) suggest that de facto selectivity is less of an issue on the internet due to diversity in peoples
social networks, including weak ties.
A potential solution to this problem is to use experiments that exogenously manipulate aspects of
the media environment. But while laboratory studies are designed to maintain internal validity, they
do so at the cost of generalizability: such media choice experiments typically offer only a handful
of selections. This is increasingly critical as researchers focus on selective exposure on the internet,
where the number of sources potentially rises to the thousands (Sood and Lelkes 2016, p. 25). More
broadly, behavior in controlled settings may not match the real world, especially if, as I outline in the
next section, the defaults and shortcuts that people employ structure their online media consumption
in ways that are hard to reconstruct in an artificial environment. When it comes to studying online
behavior, ecological validity is key (Iyengar 2010).
Uniquely in this literature, I am able to address each of these issues through my research design,
which combines a large sample of individual-level web visit data (N = 6, 319, 441) with an online
field experiment and a quasi-experiment. I avoid the measurement problem by taking advantage of
an online panel of respondents who opt in to provide real-time web tracking via unobtrusive soft6

ware installed on their computers. To study the extent to which selectivity is the result of de facto
arrangements, I both exogenously manipulate respondents political environments in an experiment
and take advantage of an unexpected, major political scandal that developed over the course of data
collection. Finally, since the study tracks respondents in their real-world environments, there is no
artificial restriction of the choice set. I use measures of site-level ideological slant, detailed below,
that cover nearly 500 web domains.

Active and Passive Information Search

Beyond simply measuring the prevalence of selective exposure, it is important to understand the
conditions under which we expect to observe it. The existence of contextual factors may also explain
why the empirical literature remains somewhat unsettled. I develop a simple set of expectations
derived from the interaction of informational needs and particular features of the online browsing
experience. People seek out information for a variety of reasons, including reinforcement of beliefs
but also to learn about a topic or to prepare for a task (including anticipated future arguments; see
Valentino et al. 2009).2 Seeking out specific information about politicsfor example, in the context of
an upcoming election or an issue that could affect an individual personallymeans relying on a set of
open-ended search strategies that may differ markedly from day-to-day forms of media consumption.
Central to the distinction between these two modes is the idea of passive versus active reception of
information. The former occurs within a context of ingrained habits and defaults, while the latter may
depend on cues and heuristics that help people navigate less familiar territory (e.g., Popkin 1991).
These two modes are situated within an information environment that has a certain number of
available sources, a perceived cost of switching, and other relevant features. Contemporary accounts
of Internet media tend to both assume costs that approach zero and to overlook the hidden obstacles and defaults that structure peoples habits online.3 To take the simplest example, modern web
2

This perspective shares some similarities with the active audience theory of Arceneaux and Johnson (2013), which
emphasizes purposeful media choices driven by a variety of goals, and can be traced to the concept of information utility
outlined in Freedman and Sears (1965).
3
The canonical formal model of news consumption in a high-choice environment (Mullainathan and Shleifer 2005)

browsers come pre-loaded with bookmarks for large news and entertainment sites (such as AOL and
Yahoo). Many people still use portals for email and other services which link to headlines, weather
and other information. Sometimes, such sites automatically load on startup. It is not hard to customize
ones settings, but doing so already requires preferences over sourcesa perceived cost that may be
too high for many people. For individuals with passing or intermittent interest in politics, such builtin choices may be sufficient for most day-to-day needs. The cumulative effect of this passive mode
would be a tendency toward balance or moderation in peoples media diets.
Conversely, people need to rely on different strategies when actively seeking out information.
Rather than passively relying on semi-hidden defaults, it becomes necessary to use search engines,
query ones friends or social networks (crowdsourcing), or consciously think about particular sources
of information that would be useful. If the passive mode encourages a tendency toward centrism and
homogeneity in media choices, active search sometimes creates opportunities for personal predispositions to creep in. For example, responses to campaign developments or gaffes can trigger partisan
shortcuts (Redlawsk 2002). On the other hand, depending on the nature of the task, the active mode
can lead to a relatively unbiased search for information (Kunda 1990). A search for factual information, for instance, may necessitate casting a wide net, seeking out relatively objective sources, and
avoiding partisan outlets. The expected effect of an active search process on media consumption is
therefore conditional on whether the primary motivation is partisan reinforcement or gathering accurate information (Kruglanski 1999).
If the choice architecture of passive internet usebookmarks, homepages, search enginestends
to direct traffic to large portals that are relatively centrist in orientation, it would take an external
shock to nudge people, at least temporarily, out of their habits (e.g., Sunstein and Thaler 2008).
Such a shock would have differential effects on media consumption: toward even greater balance if an
accuracy motivation were induced, and toward more bias if a partisan or directional motivation were
triggered.

assumes psychic costs for reading ideologically inconsistent news but does not incorporate the cost of changing habits or
otherwise rearranging ones default choices.

Data and Research Design

Given the shortcomings of survey-based approaches to studying media exposure, I follow the lead of
pioneering scholars who turned to third-party data on web visits to better understand online media
consumption patterns (Tewksbury 2003; Gentzkow and Shapiro 2011). This approach generates useful macro-level evidence by aggregating to the level of individual web domains. Flaxman, Goel and
Rao (2016) advanced the literature by obtaining micro-level web visit data but, lacking individuallevel covariates, they were forced to impute partisan leanings using geography (extracted from users
IP addresses). My approach, which combines individual survey and web tracking data, is most related to Dvir-Gvirsman, Tzfati and Menchen-Trevino (2014), who hand-coded web tracking data from
a sample of Israeli Internet users in an online survey.

Web Tracking Data

My primary data source is a set of individual-level survey responses merged with panelists Internet
browsing history. This data was collected by the online polling firm YouGov in conjunction with the
web tracking service Wakoopa. It provides direct evidence of respondents media habits for obtaining
political (and non-political) information online, without the need to rely on survey-based media exposure questions of uncertain validity (Prior 2013a; Guess 2015). It is unique in that it combines data
on site visits along with demographic and political covariates on each member of the sample. Aside
from financial transactions, secure connections, and passwords, there are no restrictions on the types
of websites that can be included in the data. Moreover, unlike the approach used in Guess (2015), the
software tracks web traffic for all browsers installed on a users computer.4
The online tracking panel is currently branded as YouGov Pulse (see Figure 2). Panelists are recruited from YouGovs traditional participant pool via incentives.5 Those who install the Wakoopa
software on their computers provide explicit consent for sending anonymized web visit data to YouGov,
4

Since the software collects system-level HTTP requests, browser-level privacy settings do not affect data collection.
At least initially, these incentives have been very strong: 4,000 points for signing up and downloading the Wakoopa
softwareroughly 8 times the number offered for a typical surveyand 1,000 additional points every month. Participants
in online surveys can redeem these points for clothing, prepaid gift cards, and other merchandise.
5

Figure 2: Screen shot of an email sent to YouGov panelists on April 8, 2015, inviting participation in
YouGov Pulse.
which in turn agrees not to share it with third-party vendors. Users can pause the tracking for 15minute increments and are free to uninstall and leave the panel at any time.
The main dataset contains more than 6.3 million observations at the respondent-site level, covering panelists who installed the tracking software on their desktop computers (excluding mobile
phones). This sample includes site visits from 1,392 individuals over a three-week period in 2015,
from February 27 to March 19. Since respondents were not recruited using probability sampling, I
construct sample weights for each respondent by raking to population marginal distributions of age,
gender, race, region (all from 2014 Census estimates), and party identification (from 2014 Pew Research Center estimates). Table 1 summarizes the demographic characteristics of the sample before
and after weighting. The raw sample skews younger and whiter than the general population, although
10

Table 1: YouGov Pulse Sample Demographics

Category

Unweighted Proportion

Weighted Proportion

18-24
25-44
45-64
65+

0.04
0.315
0.608
0.037

0.13
0.34
0.34
0.19

Male
Female

0.44
0.56

0.49
0.51

Democrat
Republican

0.372
0.226

0.32
0.23

Northeast
South
Midwest
West

0.183
0.342
0.237
0.238

0.18
0.37
0.22
0.23

White
Black
Hispanic
Asian

0.756
0.09
0.05
0.037

0.64
0.12
0.14
0.05

the gender and party breakdowns are fairly representative.

Measuring Media Slant

Data that links individuals to media consumption provides the heart of the evidence in this analysis. However, one final component is necessary: a valid method of scaling the ideological slant of
individual online media sources. Here, I briefly summarize the available methods.
There are three basic approaches in the existing literature. Audience-based methods use aggregate
data on visitors to infer the political orientation of outlets (Golbeck and Hansen 2014; Flaxman, Goel
and Rao 2016). Aside from the basic assumption that people can correctly discern the ideological
slant of sources, these methods posit a relationship between the proportion of liberals (conservatives)
who visit a media outlet and how left-leaning (right-leaning) it is. More problematic is the possibility
that this approach stacks the deck in favor of finding selective exposure (Sood and Lelkes 2016).
Rather than focus on the audience, content-based methods use elements of media contentfrom
11

citations to external sources of authority to the full text of articlesto estimate the ideological positions of publications (Groseclose and Milyo 2005; Gentzkow and Shapiro 2010; Budak, Goel and
Rao 2016). These provide highly correlated scores, although the amount of data required limits the
number of sources whose positions can be reliably estimated. Moreover, such methods often rely on
speech records from the U.S. Congress to link text to partisanship, yet estimates of discernible partisanship in Congressional speech patterns varies depending on the method (Gentzkow, Shapiro and
Taddy 2016; Lauderdale and Herzog 2016).
Most recently, scholars have adapted ideal point estimation techniques for using revealed preferences on social networks (i.e., follow patterns and likes) to scale individuals, political elites, and
(potentially) online media outlets on the ideological spectrum (Barber and Sood 2014; Barber 2015;
Bond and Messing 2015). These methods are well-validated and extremely promising, but at least so
far the number of outlets with available estimates is limited.
The limitation shared by all of these methods for the purposes of this study is the relatively small
number of websites and publications with ideological slant scores. Perhaps the most well-known
method, that of Groseclose and Milyo (2005), covers 20 newspapers and television shows. A more
recent content-based attempt, by Budak, Goel and Rao (2016), covers 15 sources. Gentzkow and
Shapiro (2010) estimate scores for many more publications435but all are print newspapers.
To solve this problem, I make use of alignment scores produced by Bakshy, Messing and
Adamic (2015) to study exposure to news and opinion content shared on Facebook. Fundamentally,
the method is extremely simple: A web domains alignment score is the average of the self-reported
ideology of users who have shared pages from that domain on Facebook. More specifically, the
authors use a sample of 10.1 million active U.S. users who choose to report their ideological selfplacement to friends on the social network. Starting from a list of 7 million unique URLs shared by
those users over a six-month period in 2014-2015, the authors train a hard vs. soft news classifier
using section identifiers in the URLs themselves (e.g., usnews, world, etc.) to produce training
labels.
With the resulting set of more than 220,000 hard news links shared by at least 20 people in the
12

sample, the authors produce average alignment scores for nearly 500 hard-news web domains. Notably, since the domains with scores are estimated to be the most closely related to news and politics,
an advantage of this method is that it provides a built-in filtering mechanism for URLs in the Wakoopa
data. Two additional features of this approach deserve emphasis. First, similar to scaling methods, it
is a behavioral measure of slant not dependent on coding schemes or similarity to particular phrases.
And second, by construction, it produces scores on the same scale (1-5) as self-reported ideology,
which aligns with the empirical goal of studying the relationship between predispositions and media
choice.
As Bakshy, Messing and Adamic write, the alignment scores capture differences in the kind of
content shared among a set of partisans, which can include topic matter, framing, and slant. These
scores, averaged over websites, capture key differences in well-known ideologically aligned media
sources. While ideological slant is clearly a major component of the scores, it may not exclusively drive the estimates. And since slant is just one of several potential drivers of diverging media
consumption habits between liberals and conservatives, using these scores constitutes an especially
difficult test for findings of relative balance in media consumption: Any cross-ideological overlap in
media diets means overcoming numerous additional differences in content, such as sensationalism,
quality, and even length. Reassuringly, however, the authors find that their measure has a high degree
of convergent validity with estimates of pure ideological slant. As reported in the studys appendix,
the Pearsons correlation with matching scores by Budak, Goel and Rao (2016) is 0.91 and with
Gentzkow and Shapiro (2010) is 0.56.
It is important to note that these correlations are on the domain level. As with all current methods
of estimating media slant, this approach requires the assumption that individual pieces of content (i.e.,
articles or blog posts) share the political orientation of the media outlet. This assumption may not hold
if, for example, a left-leaning website publishes rebuttal pieces (Sood and Lelkes 2016). Miscoding
the orientation of individual pages in this way would suggest a greater degree of partisan consistency
in users online browsing activity than there actually is.
Figure 3 displays a sample of highly visited web domains according to their alignment scores. The
13

scores clearly have face validity, with conservative websites such as Breitbart.com (0.91) on the right
and left-wing sites such as Daily Kos (0.90) on the left. Near the center are a number of mainstream
portals such as Yahoo! News (0.05) and MSN News (0.06). (Closest to the center, but not shown, is

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More
Liberal

More
Conservative

Figure 3: Some of the most-visited sites in the Wakoopa sample, arranged on a left-right scale
according to the alignment scores for each.
One final point concerns the interpretation of the scores. It is important to note that the sample
of users employed to produce the estimates comprises approximately 9% of the American Facebook
population over 18. These are individuals who are likely more politically engaged than average given
their willingness to openly share their political affiliations. Further, sharing a piece of news content to
ones friends is at least partially an act of self-expression. In social contexts such as these, perceptions
and self-presentation (e.g., Hogan 2010) are important factors to consider. For example, people who
want to be seen as consistent partisans, even if they are not, may feel the need to curate their social
media feeds accordingly. This would bias upwards the alignment between self-reported ideology
and media slant. Theoretically, then, one might expect some movement of sources on the left or right
toward the polesi.e., possible exaggeration of the extremity of partisan websites. If this is the case
14

(despite the high correlation with existing measures), then it again cuts against a finding of overlap in
users media consumption habits.

Empirical Approach
The analysis proceeds in three steps. First, from a purely observational standpoint, I take the hardnews-related web visits in the Wakoopa data and observe the overall distribution of media slant by
partisanship. I refine this approach by modeling the individual-level determinants of each respondents
average media slant over all their visits. I look at both counts (the number of visits to a given web
domain) and duration (the number of seconds spent at a given web domain).
Second, I explore the results of an online field experiment conducted on a subset of the YouGov
Pulse panel. This experiment encouraged subjects to seek out information about a relatively novel
political issue. Due to random assignment, I can look at the heterogeneous effects of this treatment,
by partisanship, on downstream media consumption. I use a similar empirical approach by averaging
over individuals visits to compute an overall media diet slant as the outcome of interest.
Third, I take advantage of a unique quasi-experiment: Near the beginning of data collection,
it was revealed in the news media that Hillary Clinton used a private email server while serving
as Secretary of State. Consistent with an account that emphasizes the co-production of political
scandal between political opposition and the media (Nyhan 2015), this development was immediately
interpreted as a potentially devastating revelation for Clinton (Patterson 2016). For the purposes of
this study, it is a plausibly exogenous political event with large potential consequences for media
consumption behavior. I take advantage of the revelations and subsequent coverage to facilitate an
over-time analysis of the change in individuals average media diets in the data.

I. Balance vs. Bias in Online Media Exposure

Table 2 displays a sample of the most-visited websites in the YouGov Pulse panel, along with the
number of visitors logged over the three-week periodboth raw totals and those derived from apply15

ing respondent-level sample weightsand the Facebook alignment score. Immediately apparent
is that MSN Newsa mainstream, centrist news and information portalis by far the most popular
source, 3-4 times more visited than the next site in the table, AOL. This somewhat matches available
figures from the Internet analytics firm comScore, which show that among political and news sites
logged in the YouGov data, MSN is the second most visited overall (to CNN.com). Looking at the
partisan and ideological slant measures, it is clear that conservative sites such as the Drudge Report
and Townhall have higher scores than left-leaning sources such as Slate. A notable pattern in the table
is that mainstream media sources perceived as liberal, such as the website of The New York Times
and Buzzfeed, are scored further to the left than comparable conservative-leaning sources such as the
websites for The New York Post and The Wall Street Journal (but not more openly conservative sites
like Fox News).
Domain
msn.com
aol.com
townhall.com
finance.yahoo.com
foxnews.com
buzzfeed.com
news.yahoo.com
huffingtonpost.com
wsj.com
businessinsider.com
nytimes.com
dailykos.com
nypost.com
washingtonpost.com
freep.com

Alignment Score (Slant)

-0.08
0.01
0.93
0.08
0.78
-0.52
0.05
-0.62
0.28
-0.06
-0.55
-0.90
0.25
-0.26
-0.46

# Visits (Unweighted)
36,263
9,110
4,372
5,949
4,777
4,077
5,000
3,898
994
1,544
2,532
2,148
764
2,025
914

# Visits (Weighted)
41,232
12,300
11,118
8,702
6,606
6,338
4,266
4,063
3,989
3,960
3,347
3,211
3,015
2,975
2,731

Table 2: Alignment scores and the number of visits to each domain in the YouGov Pulse sample.
Both raw counts and weighted counts (using raking weights) are shown.
The Facebook alignment scores are computed for web domains classified via supervised learning
as hard news. I use the full set of domains with the exception of four highly visited destinations, which
I exclude from the analyses here: twitter.com, wikipedia.org, youtube.com, and amazon.com.6 While
6

The first three domains may have legitimately been classified as hard news given what types of individual pages,
tweets, or videos were shared. It is not clear why Amazon.com was included as a hard news domain; it may have been the

16

the first three sites can be used to learn about political news, it is unlikely that they are a primary source
for hard news for most people. (In addition, the inclusion of twitter.com may confound analyses since
the bulk of Twitter use is non-political and any scores may simply reflect the political makeup of
users who share links on other subjects.) Combining the remaining scores with the Wakoopa tracking
data then results in a subset of web visits covering opinion and news about politics and other current
events.
Confirming similar findings elsewhere (Flaxman, Goel and Rao 2016), the resulting share devoted
to news and information about politics is strikingly low: 6.9 percent of all visits, or just over 435,000
out of the 6,319,441 observations in the Wakoopa data. This is also a ceiling given that websites
publish non-political hard news stories. I separately aggregate the number of visits per site for respondents who identify as Democrats and those who identify as Republicans. Overall, I was able to
match 444 politics and news websites in the sample to a measure of alignment. For Democrats only,
this number is somewhat lower, at 360, and for Republicans there were 318 (Table 1 shows that there
were fewer Republicans in the sample, possibly driving this disparity).
I begin by looking at the overall distribution of website visits, aggregated across individuals. This
provides a macro-level view of news consumption between groups. Figure ?? plots the density of
site visits against estimated slant by partisan identification. Most site visits in the YouGov Pulse
samplewhether among Democrats or Republicanscluster around a handful of relatively centrist
sources such as CNN, MSN, and Yahoo! News. And overall, the density curves for Democrats and
Republicans overlap substantially (more than half of the area under both curves, 55.5%). However,
there is an important and visible exception to this pattern. The density curve for Republicans is
bimodal: In addition to the peak in the middle of the ideological spectrum, there is a spike on the
right corresponding to popular conservative sites such as Breitbart, Townhall, and the Drudge Report.
This is a significant result that persists after applying raking weights for demographics and partisan
identification.
The bumps on the left for Democrats correspond to a series of outlets that may be perceived as
result of classification error, which can occur, for example, when a training set has insufficient coverage of the universe of
possible documents.

17

left-leaning but are also often considered mainstream: CNN.com, Buzzfeed, NYTimes.com, and The
Huffington Post moving leftwards from the center, ending with the genuinely liberal website Daily
Kos. While these sites occupy a spectrum that smoothly flows from center to left, the corresponding
spike among Republicans on the right is more ideologically distinct; there is a visible gap between
traffic to centrist and center-right sources and the ones that are further to the right.

Density (Weighted)

Fo
x
N
B ew
re
itb s
ar
t

SN
M

N
N
C

H
N uf
YT fP
imo
es

ai

ly

Ko
s

1.5

1.0

0.5

0.0
1

Ideological Slant of Media Source

Among ...

Democrats

Republicans

Figure 4: Density plot of aggregate site visits from the YouGov Pulse sample. Site ideological slant
on the x-axis is measured as the average self-reported ideological placement of Facebook users who
share hard news articles from a given domain. N = 435, 454 visits, aggregated across respondents in
sample with raking weights applied.
It is crucial to note, however, that aggregating in this way obscures important individual-level
18

differences. Exploring further, I produce a measure of the ideological lean of each respondents
media diet by simply averaging over the available alignment scores for his or her web visits in the
Pulse data. For example, if a respondent made 10 visits to a left-leaning site at 0.15 and one visit
to a right-leaning site at 0.10, her average would be 12.7 (including repeat visits). I then plot the
distribution of these individual media diet scores by party in Figure 5.
8

Density

0
1.0

0.5

0.0

0.5

1.0

Average Media Diet Slant

Figure 5: Density plot of mean alignment score for each individual in the Pulse data by party
identification (N = 1,228).
The results show a remarkable degree of balance in respondents overall media diets regardless of
partisan affiliation. Whether Democrat, Republican, or independent, the large bulk of these individuals media diets cluster around the center of the ideological spectrum. There is a visible correlation
19

between party and the average lean of the media dietsthe blue curve, representing Democrats, is
somewhat fatter to the left of centerbut it is slight. Comparing to ??, it is clear that traffic to
the most partisan websites is coming from a very small proportion of respondents. Moreover, based
on their media consumption patterns, these individuals are not representative of most others in their
group. For instance, Figure A2 in the Appendix shows that even most people who identify in the data
as very conservative have relatively centrist media preferences. But those who do not are driving a
vastly disproportionate amount of traffic to conservative sites.
This evidence, then, is consistent with a view thatamong the fraction of respondents who actively visit news and politics websitesthe preponderance of the content encountered is relatively
centrist and balanced ideologically. There is also suggestive evidence of an intense subgroup of Republicans who, possibly in addition to mainstream sources, consume conservative, but not liberal,
news and information about politics. Similar bumps on the left correspond to the popular viral site
Buzzfeed and other left-leaning mainstream sources.

II. Experimental Evidence

To supplement the observational evidence presented above, I designed an online field experiment to be
run on a subset of the YouGov Pulse panel. In designing the treatment, I selected an encouragement
intended to induce active search for novel political information. In particular, I asked subjects to
spend some time learning about an emerging political topic that could conceivably be mapped onto
the partisan divide but was not yet salient in political discourse.
There are two key advantages to this additional study. First, since relevant demographic and
political covariates have already been collected on all panelists, the experiment could be embedded
in respondents normal day-to-day survey usage with only a single additional question. And, since
implementation did not require any steps to install new software, measurement occurred completely
unobtrusively and possibly without subjects conscious awareness (but, of course, with their previous
consent).
20

Design
For this experiment I chose an issue that was not completely politicized at the time of the survey but
that clearly had the potential to polarize along party lines. The issue was whether to allow Syrian
refugees to settle in the United States, and the survey was fielded soon after Secretary of State John
Kerry had publicly committed to admitting a substantial number of refugees per year (but before
the terrorist attacks in Paris on November 13, 2015). Subjects in the Pulse panel were randomly
assigned to be given the following question in the course of filling out a daily YouGov survey (those
in the control condition were not shown the question at all): After several years of war and unrest, a
large wave of migrants and refugees from the Middle East, mainly Syria, has been fleeing to Europe.
Responding to increasing pressure domestically and from European allies, Secretary of State John
Kerry said last Sunday that the United States would accept 100,000 Syrian refugees per year by 2017.
What is your view on the number of refugees the United States should accept from that region per
year?7
In fact, the answers to the question are not of interest for the current study and were intended
merely to encourage thought about the subject. After answering the question, those in the treatment
group saw the following text on a new screen: Thank you for your response! We may be interested in
following up with you in a future survey as developments on the refugee crisis continue. Please keep
informing yourself about this issue just as you normally would for a political topic like this one.
We are not looking for any right answer, and feel free to use sources you typically turn to (including
on the Internet) for news and information. Notably, subjects were not told that subsequent web visit
data may be used to analyze the slant of their media diet.
The experiment was placed in the daily survey made available to YouGovs survey panelists over
the course of four days from September 25-28, 2015. Typically a maximum of 1,200 panelists will
respond to the daily survey on a given weekday, and a fraction of those have the tracking software
installed. In total, this procedure returned 451 valid responses from Pulse panelists. However, only

Possible responses were An unlimited number, Many more than 100,000, Somewhat more than 100,000,
100,000 is about right, Somewhat less than 100,000, Much fewer than 100,000, and None at all.

21

120 of those generated Wakoopa data that could be used to measure outcomes (treatment: 61, control: 59).8 This is not a threat to inference since subjects were allocated to treatment using simple
random assignment (i.e., as they entered the survey). Half of these subjects (60) were also part of the
original sample of 1,392 Pulse respondents. To collect outcomes, I gathered Wakoopa data for these
respondents over a full week, from September 26-October 2.
In order to generate individual-level measures of the overall ideological slant of media diets, I
averaged over the alignment scores for all applicable web visits recorded by each subject. I used the
same measures as in the previous section. To ensure that measurement only captured post-treatment
media consumption, I removed visits time-stamped before survey completion for those in the treatment group.

Results
In Figure 6, we see a heterogeneous effect of the encouragement to seek out information on a political
topic, with the distribution of strong conservatives average media slant moving toward that of moderates and strong liberals (and the media diets of the latter two groups staying much the same in terms
of partisan slant). These results clearly rule out a polarizing effect, since any preexisting bias in media
dietsas seen in the distinct peaks of the distributions with dotted linesis reduced. It appears that
this intervention was more likely to moderate subjects media diets than to polarize them according
to ideological or partisan predispositions.
Table 3 reports these results in the form of OLS regressions in which the parameters of interest
are the coefficients on the interactions between the treatment indicator and ideological self-placement.
The first result is the lack of a main effect: There is no hypothetical reason why we would expect an
overall shift in media diet slant as opposed to heterogeneous effects. The interaction with the indicator
for very conservative, however, is estimated to be between -0.34 and -0.32, which translates to a
sizable leftward shift in the average slant of strong conservatives media diets caused by assignment to
8

YouGov investigated the possible sources of this issue, but the likeliest reason is that some respondents were part
of the Pulse panel but were either using different devices to access the survey or had uninstalled the software from their
computers.

22

1.5

Density

1.0

0.5

0.0
2

Average Slant of Media Diet

Very liberal, Control

Moderate, Control

Very conservative, Control

Very liberal, Treatment

Moderate, Treatment

Very conservative, Treatment

Figure 6: Density plot of individuals media diet partisanship in the YouGov Pulse experiment, as
measured by the mean alignment score of all sites visited by each respondent post-treatment. Lines
denote ideology and treatment subgroups. Figure excludes conservatives and liberals for ease of
presentation.
the treatment encouragement. The magnitude of this shift amounts to more than 15% of the possible
range of media slant scores, and it approaches but does not cross the traditional threshold for statistical
significance in both models (p 0.06). Astonishingly, the effect of the treatment is larger than the
baseline effect of being a conservative who is more likely to visit conservative-leaning news websites
in the first place. A final point worth noting is that having a right-leaning media diet is associated
strongly with identifying as very conservative but weakly or not at all with merely identifying as
conservative. This could be an artifact of the sample, which is not intended to be representative, but
it suggests that the results shown in Figure 6, which focuses on those who identify as very liberal
23

or very conservative, are driving the bulk of the movement.

It is possible that with other topics, we would see most of the movement among liberals rather
than conservatives. Perhaps most of the information (as opposed to opinion) one could encounter
on refugees tended to be on moderate to left-leaning news sources. Regardless, it appears that the
factual nature of the active search task triggered a relative moderation in the media diets of the most
conservative subjects. This may simply be a kind of reversion to the mean: If there is some sort of echo
chamber of strong conservatives who consume ideologically congenial content from websites that do
not provide the necessary background information for someone motivated by accuracy concerns, then
the result would be a leftward shift in media consumption driven by relatively centrist (but less rightleaning) sources.

III. The Impact of an Unexpected Political Scandal

While the experiment is suggestive of a novel pattern of results, it is worth highlighting two related
shortcomings: the sample size and the strength of the treatment. The size of the sample may have been
sufficient for a typical experiment designed to measure straightforward mean differences between
treatment and control groups. But given the inherent importance of heterogeneity when exploring
media consumption and selective exposure, precisely identifying effects by subgroup can be difficult.
This problem interacts with the nature of the treatmenta nudge in lieu of a shove.
A separate issue is that by design, the refugee crisis was chosen because, at the time, it was not yet
being interpreted through a partisan lens in American political discourse. Would a more polarizing
pattern reveal itself with a traditional partisan stimulus about which attitudes are more ingrained? As
it happens, a natural experiment presented itself over the course of data collection for the original
YouGov Pulse sample in early 2015 that allows me to test these questions.
On March 2, four days into data collection, The New York Times posted an article reporting the
existence of a private email server used by Hillary Clinton while serving as Secretary of State.9 This
9

It appeared on the front page the next day and was picked up by major news organizations around the country.
For the original story, see: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/03/us/politics/hillary-clintons-use-of-private-email-at-state-

24

Table 3: Effect of Survey Encouragement

Average Slant of Media Diet
(1)
0.041
(0.094)
Conservative
0.007
(0.145)
Liberal
0.010
(0.111)
Very Conservative
0.457
(0.135)
Very Liberal
0.175
(0.118)
Treatment x Conservative
0.383
(0.210)
Treatment x Liberal
0.031
(0.170)
Treatment x Very Conservative 0.320
(0.172)
Treatment x Very Liberal
0.035
(0.162)
(Intercept)
0.092
(0.072)
N
97
R2
0.285
Treatment

p < .1; p < .05; p < .01

25

(2)
0.045
(0.100)
0.016
(0.153)
0.018
(0.119)
0.448
(0.141)
0.160
(0.125)
0.358
(0.224)
0.017
(0.177)
0.344
(0.179)
0.005
(0.169)
0.150
(0.089)
96
0.306

was immediately treated as a major political scandal given Clintons anticipated run for president
and perceptions that the Clintons have been inclined toward secrecy. The news media continued to
cover the story in subsequent days, leading to a public response from Clinton on March 10 (roughly
halfway through data collection) in which she said the server was intended for convenience. I treat
this event as a large, exogenous political shock whose effects on individuals media consumption can
be measured over time.
If the email revelations were a major driver of hard news content, both on the supply side (content
producers) and the demand side (readers), then the pattern should be evident in both general metrics
of news coverage and in the Wakoopa web tracking data collected on YouGov Pulse panelists media
consumption. To test for this, I gathered data from Google Trends on mentions of Clinton in news
articles over the corresponding period. As the top panel of Figure 7 shows, there is a discernible rise
in interest in Clintonalready a public figure often in the newsover the course of the next week.
To see whether this pattern is reflected in the content of pages actually visited by Pulse panelists, I
attempted to scrape the text from each unique URL in the data (N = 2, 236, 044 pages). I extracted the
relevant text from each document and converted to a sparse document-feature matrix, which facilitated
quick searches of the full corpus. I plot the number of mentions of Clinton in the bottom panel of
Figure 7. A spike in mentions is clearly evident, particularly after Clintons March 10 statement to
the press. The lag between the two patterns likely reflects the time it took for stories about Clinton to
filter into respondents day-to-day media consumption.
I explore any effect of the email revelations on respondents online media consumption patterns
graphically. In Figure 8, I plot the mean alignment score among Democrats, Republicans, and independents in the Pulse panel on each day. Most obviously, there is a major spike in mean conservatism
of media consumption on March 4 (with the increase beginning on March 2, when the revelations
were made public), but only among Republicans. After March 4, mean conservatism returns to its initial position of roughly 0.1 (out of a scale from -1, for most liberal, to +1). This is the second pattern:
As would be expected from the results in Figure ??, the magnitude of the overall slant of partisans
department-raises-flags.html

26

Google Trends
100

75

50

Interest in Clinton

25

Site Text (Web Tracking Data)

5000

4000

3000

2000

ar
M

ar
M

ar
M

16

02

09

1000

Figure 7: Google Trends (top) and mentions in scraped text from URLs in the Wakoopa sample
(bottom) tracking mentions of Hillary Clinton over the course of data collection.
media diets is not that greatapproximately 0.1 on either side of 0, or 5% (in either direction) of the
range of the available ideological spectrum for media sources. Third, aside from the large spike on
March 4, the average slant in each group is remarkably stable from day to day. And fourth, among
independents, the average slant is almost precisely 0, in the very center of the scale.
These results are striking in light of the evidence discussed so far. It appears that, in contrast to
a relatively nonpartisan issue, a scandal that immediately maps onto the political divide involving
a well-known figure can immediately drive traffic to more partisan sources. This could be for a
number of reasons. Aside from the desire to learn about the issue, readers may have been seeking
commentary that assimilates information about the scandal into preexisting partisan narratives. That
the pattern is only seen among Republicans could be due to the fact that the scandal targeted a highprofile Democrat. It is also possible that the asymmetry is due to inherent differences in the ways that
27

0.6

Media Diet Conservatism

0.4

0.2

0.0

Dem

Rep

01
5
M

ar

18

,2

01
5
M

ar

15

,2

01
5
M

ar

12

,2

01
5
M

ar

09

,2

01
5
06
M

ar
M

ar

03

,2

01
5
,2

01
5
,2
28

Party ID

Fe
b

Ind

Figure 8: Average media diet slant, as measured by alignment scores, separately for Democrats,
Republicans, and independents on each day of Wakoopa data collection.
liberals and conservatives process information and seek cognitive closure (Jost et al. 2003; Amodio
et al. 2007) or simply to the existence of more of an echo chamber on the right (as in Figure ??).
Most importantly, the spike in right-leaning web visits among Republicans does not lead to lasting
changes in media consumption habits.
Finally, I go beyond averages to examine how much of Democrats and Republicans media diets
overlap on each day. I compute a simple statistic, the Overlap Coefficient (OC), which sums the
shared area underneath both density curves, then plot this over time. Figure 9 displays the results
for both visits and visits weighted by duration. As in 8, there is one notable spike, but it manifests
28

here as a marked drop in the coefficient on March 4. This corresponds to the strong rightward shift
in average slant among Republicans documented above. Here, it is more evident on the right side of
the figure, which plots the coefficient for raw visits, but it is also visible on the left when weighted
by the duration of each web visit. Regardless of this blip, a larger trend is visible in the data: overlap
increases over time.
Duration

Visits

0.7

Overlap of Dem vs. Rep Media Diets

0.6

0.5

0.4

0.3

0.2

18
M
ar

15
M
ar

12
M
ar

09
M
ar

06
M
ar

03
M
ar

Fe
b

28

18
M
ar

15
M
ar

12
M
ar

09
M
ar

06
M
ar

M
ar

Fe
b

28

03

Day (2015)

Figure 9: Overlap coefficient (OC) for Democratic and Republican media diet slant on each day of
Wakoopa data collection, shown for both duration-weighted visits (left) and raw visits (right).

Discussion
Since the original Columbia studies, research within the minimal effects paradigm has often relied
on the mechanism of selective exposure to explain null findings of media effects (Lazarsfeld, Berelson
29

and Gaudet 1944; Klapper 1960; Bennett and Iyengar 2008; Arceneaux and Johnson 2010). Yet, as
a growing number of scholars have documented, the evidence for selective exposure is not as strong
as initially claimed. It is likely that research using self-reported measures exaggerate the evidence for
selective exposure, given that people may be more likely to remember using sources that align with
their political identities. It is also possible that evidence of effects in the laboratory do not generalize
to the real world and that given day-to-day distractions and competing demands for time, peoples
propensity to select sources of congenial information is lower than expected.
Aggregated over more than 400,000 visits, the ideological flavor of most content respondents exposed themselves to is generally centrist. Rather than the strong bimodal prediction made by theorists
who express concerns about online echo chambers, the most-visited media sources heavily cluster in
the middle. One caveat to this conclusion is suggestive evidence of a smaller group of conservatives
who consume primarily right-leaning content.
I couple this observational portrait of panelists balanced media diets with an experimental design
that does not reveal strong evidence of ideological segregation. Randomly inducing participants to educate themselves about a novel political issue does not induce patterns of partisan selective exposure;
if anything, there is evidence of a heterogeneous effect in which conservatives expose themselves to
more liberal content, resulting in overall moderation of media diets.
As a result of treatment in the experiment, subjects likely relied on the kinds of low-cost defaults
that typically direct readers to mainstream and centrist (rather than niche and extreme) sources: search
engines, homepages, and bookmarks. The results suggest that subjects who sought out information
about a complex, non-salient political topic were not generally following a directional motivation or
seeking out only congenial content (Kruglanski 1999). Or, at least, that motivation was not strong
enough to overcome the cost of overcoming ingrained media consumption habits and the defaults
built into the typical Internet users daily browsing environment. Perhaps, then, rather than facilitating
invisible filter bubbles, defaults can actually serve as a moderating filter for new information (Pariser
2011).
Finally, I show that a well-publicized, exogenous political shock induces asymmetric but tempo30

rary effects on media diets. Specifically, Republicans respond by consuming markedly more conservative hard news content. The next day, however, this pattern vanishes. The overall portrait is one of
limited conditions under which selective exposure can occur: among conservatives in particular, and
for high-profile and clearly partisan issues. For other groups, and especially for issues that have not
been explicitly mapped onto the partisan divide, moderation of media diets is observed.

31

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35

Appendix A: Additional Tables and Figures

Density (Weighted)

Fo
x
N
B ew
re
itb s
ar
t

M
SN

N
N
C

H
N uf
YT fP
imo
es

D
ai

ly

Ko
s

1.5

1.0

0.5

0.0
1

Ideological Slant of Media Source

Among ...

Democrats

Republicans

Figure A1: Density plot of aggregate site visit duration from the YouGov Pulse sample. Site
ideological slant on the x-axis is measured as the average self-reported ideological placement of
Facebook users who share hard news articles from a given domain. N = 435, 454 visits, aggregated
across respondents in sample with raking weights applied.

36

Density

0
1.0

0.5

0.0

0.5

1.0

Average Media Diet Slant

very lib

liberal

moderate

conservative

very con

Figure A2: Density plot of mean alignment score for each individual in the Pulse data by ideological
self-placement (N = 1,297).

37

% Democrat
npr.org
0.8
philly.com

Wakoopa Data (Weighted Average)

0.6

vox.com huffingtonpost.com chicagotribune.com

washingtonpost.com
nbcnews.combuzzfeed.com
salon.comcnn.com
sfgate.com
usatoday.com
time.com
dailymail.co.uk
nydailynews.com
nytimes.com

0.4

slate.com
theatlantic.com
thedailybeast.com
examiner.com
usnews.com
msnbc.com

politico.com

0.2
newsmax.com

latimes.com

today.com
nypost.com theguardian.com
cbsnews.com

0.0

theblaze.com
ijreview.com
telegraph.co.uk
foxnews.com
conservativetribune.com
breitbart.com

0.30

0.35

comScore Data

Figure A3: This figure plots the estimated share of Democrats among monthly unique visitors to
each domain (from Internet analytics firm comScore) against the corresponding quantity derived
from the Pulse data weighted to demographics. comScore maintains a 12,000-person survey panel of
the general Internet audience called Plan Metrix. Employing both direct responses and imputation,
comScore provides estimates of the overall demographic composition of individual sites audiences.
Using these estimates from March 2015, I computed the Democratic share of those who identify
with either party.

38