Both of these papers examine the trend towards \u201cselective exposure\u201d and away from diverse ideological exposure when viewing news electronically.\u00a0 At a high level, both papers are touching on the same big idea \u2013 that users seem to be creating insular \u201cecho chambers\u201d of polarized news sources based on their ideals, ignoring the viewpoints of the opposing ideology either by their own conscious choice or algorithmically by their past behavior.\u00a0 The Garrett paper looks at general web browsing for news sources and focuses on the area of opinion reinforcement.\u00a0 The study details a web-administrated behavioral study in which participants were shown a list of articles (and their summaries) and were given the choice of which ones they wanted to view.\u00a0 The study findings supported the author\u2019s hypotheses, including that users prefer to view news articles that are more opinion-reinforcing and that users will spend more time viewing those opinion-reinforcing articles.\u00a0 The Bakshy et al. study was Facebook-centered, examining how users interact with shared news articles on that platform.\u00a0 Among their findings were that ideologically cross-cutting depended on both the spectrum of friend ideologies and how often those friends shared, but that there was some evidence of ideological isolation in both liberal and conservative groups.<\/p>\n
Both of these studies had notable limitations that were discussed by the authors, but I felt that each was addressed insufficiently.\u00a0 The Garrett study made use of both a liberal and a conservative online news outlet to obtain participants, which obviously will not ensure that the sample is representative of the population<\/strong>.\u00a0 Garrett justifies this by supposing that if selective reinforcement is common in these groups, then it is likely the same among mainstream news readers; however, (1) no attempt is made to justify that statement<\/strong> (the brief mention in the Limitations section even contradicts this assertion), and (2) my intuition is that the opposite is true: that if selective reinforcement is common among centrists, then it almost certainly will be true at the ideological extremes.<\/strong>\u00a0 In my opinion, the results from this study do not generalize, and this is a killer limitation of the paper.<\/p>\n Bakshy\u2019s study has a similar limitation that the authors point out: that they are limited to recording engagement based on clicks to interact with articles.\u00a0 As a result, individuals might spend some time reading the displayed summaries of some articles but never click to open the source, and such interactions are not logged.<\/strong>\u00a0 To use the authors\u2019 phrasing, \u201cour distinction between exposure and consumption is imperfect.\u201d\u00a0 This surprised me \u2013 there was no way to record the amount of time that a summary was displayed in the browser, to measure the amount of time a viewer may have thought about that summary and decided whether or not to engage? \u00a0I know in my experience, my newsfeed is so full and my time is so limited that I purposefully limit the number of articles that I open, though I often pause to read summaries in making that decision.\u00a0 I do occasionally read the summaries of ideologically-opposing articles, but I rarely if ever engage by clicking to read the full article.<\/strong>\u00a0 Tracking exposures based on all forms of interaction would be an interesting follow-up study.<\/p>\n Despite the limitations, I thought that both studies were well-performed and well-reported with the data that the authors had gathered.\u00a0 Garrett\u2019s hypotheses were clearly stated, and the results were presented clearly to back up those hypotheses.\u00a0 I wish the Bakshy paper had been longer so that more of their results could be presented and discussed, especially with such a large set of users and exposures under study.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Both of these papers examine the trend towards \u201cselective exposure\u201d and away from diverse ideological exposure when viewing news electronically.\u00a0 At a high level, both papers are touching on the same big idea \u2013 that users seem to be creating insular \u201cecho chambers\u201d of polarized news sources based on their ideals, ignoring the viewpoints of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":133,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs6724spring18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs6724spring18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs6724spring18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs6724spring18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/133"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs6724spring18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=249"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs6724spring18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":250,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs6724spring18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249\/revisions\/250"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs6724spring18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs6724spring18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs6724spring18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}