Abstract
One might think that, compared to traditional media, social media sites allow people to choose more freely what to read and what to share, especially for politically oriented news. However, reading and sharing habits originate from deeply ingrained behaviors that might be hard to change. To test the extent to which this is true, we propose a Political News Sharing (PoNS) model that holistically captures four key aspects of social psychology: gratification, selective exposure, socialization, and trust & intimacy. Using real instances of political news sharing in Twitter, we study the predictive power of these features. As one might expect, news sharing heavily depends on what one likes and agrees with (selective exposure). Interestingly, it also depends on the credibility of a news source, i.e., whether the source is a social media friend or a news outlet (trust & intimacy) as well as on the informativeness or the enjoyment of the news article (gratification). Finally, a Twitter user tends to share articles matching his own political leaning but, at times, the user also shares politically opposing articles, if those match the leaning of his followers (socialization). Based on our PoNS model, we build a prototype of a news sharing application that promotes serendipitous political readings along our four dimensions.
Highlights
Media bias has been widely studied in cultivation theory
We propose a Political News Sharing (PoNS) model based on the two popular perspectives as theoretical foundation
Diversity from friends Having looked at the political diversity introduced by the media outlets users subscribe to, we examine the diversity introduced by their Twitter ‘friends’
Summary
Media bias has been widely studied in cultivation theory. This holds that popular media such as newspapers, television, and the Internet have the power to influence our view of the world and set our day-to-day norms. One set of theories is related to the ‘ego’s perception’ and includes two main factors: gratification, suggesting that people read and share news to satisfy their desires such as informativeness and entertainment [ ] and selective exposure, suggesting that people like to read information in agreement with their views and avoid conflicting information [ ] Another set of theories is associated with ‘alter’s perception’ and focuses on social aspects of information sharing: whether the person who passes the information is credible (trust & intimacy) and whether the person who will receive the news would like it (socialization). The fact that followers hold a certain influence over a user is not surprising, if one considers that people are influenced by peers who are up to three (social network) hops away from them [ ] Based on these four generic factors that motivate political news sharing, we demonstrate a new way of visualizing news articles that gives users a fine control over the PoNS’ four dimensions
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