News Won’t Find Me? Exploring Inequalities in Social Media News Use With Tracking Data
Lisa Merten (Hans-Bredow-Institut)
N. Metoui (TU Delft - Information and Communication Technology)
Mykola Makhortykh (University of Bern)
Damian Trilling (Universiteit van Amsterdam)
Judith Moeller (Universiteit van Amsterdam)
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Abstract
The rise of news content on social media has been accompanied by a hope that people with lower socioeconomic status and less interest in political affairs would be “accidentally” exposed to news. By combining tracking and survey data from a Dutch online panel (N = 413), we analyze how political interest, income, and education influence social media news exposure and consumption. Higher levels of political interest are associated with higher amounts of news exposure on Facebook and more news items consumed via social media. Users engage less often in news-related follow-up behavior after consuming news items via social media than after consuming news items referred via news websites. If social
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