|
| | | | |
| | | |
| Stat |
Members: 3669
Articles: 2'599'751
Articles rated: 2609
24 March 2025 |
|
| | | | |
|
Article overview
| |
|
|
Engagement Outweighs Exposure to Partisan and Unreliable News within Google Search | | Ronald E. Robertson
; Jon Green
; Damian Ruck
; Katya Ognyanova
; Christo Wilson
; David Lazer
; | | Date: |
1 Jan 2022 | | Abstract: | Popular online platforms such as Google Search have the capacity to expose
billions of users to partisan and unreliable news. Yet, the content they show
real users is understudied due to the technical challenges of independently
obtaining such data, and the lack of data sharing agreements that include it.
Here we advance on existing digital trace methods using a two-wave study in
which we captured not only the URLs participants clicked on while browsing the
web (engagement), but also the URLs they saw while using Google Search
(exposure). Using surveys paired with engagement and exposure data collected
around the 2018 and 2020 US elections, we found that strong Republicans engaged
with more partisan and unreliable news than strong Democrats did, despite the
two groups being exposed to similar amounts of partisan and unreliable news in
their Google search results. Our results suggest the search engine is not
pushing strong partisans into filter bubbles, but strong Republicans are
asymmetrically selecting into echo chambers. These findings hold across both
study waves, align with work on social media and web browsing, and provide a
rare look at the relationship between exposure and engagement. Our research
highlights the importance of users’ choices, and our approach moves the field
closer to the independent, longitudinal, and cross-platform studies it needs to
evaluate the impact of online search and social media platforms. | | Source: | arXiv, 2201.00074 | | Services: | Forum | Review | PDF | Favorites | |
|
|
No review found.
Did you like this article?
Note: answers to reviews or questions about the article must be posted in the forum section.
Authors are not allowed to review their own article. They can use the forum section.
|
| |
|
|
|
REGISTER