Incidental Exposure and Active News Feed Curation on Social Media

• In Event: Studying Incidental News

Abstract

The rise of search, social media, and now messaging applications have resulted in a dramatic shift from a media environment dominated by direct discovery to one characterized by distributed discovery. In this presentation, we use data from a survey covering 36 markets to assess the implications of this move specifically in terms of people’s news diets. We find (i) that people are incidentally exposed to news on social media, (ii) that a significant proportion of those who say they primarily encounter news on social media when they are using it for other purposes also actively curate their news feeds by adding/blocking other users and changing their settings, and (iii) that those who actively curate their feeds are exposed to more sources of news. The findings highlight that, even in distributed environments that are often characterised by algorithmic filtering, users are incidentally exposed to news and often exert some active control.

Authors

• Richard Fletcher, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism

• Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism