Abstract
Exposure to news, opinion, and civic information increasingly occurs through social media.
How do these online networks influence exposure to perspectives that cut across ideological
lines? Using deidentified data, we examined how 10.1 million U.S. Facebook users interact with
socially shared news. We directly measured ideological homophily in friend networks and
examined the extent to which heterogeneous friends could potentially expose individuals to
cross-cutting content. We then quantified the extent to which individuals encounter
comparatively more or less diverse content while interacting via Facebook’s algorithmically
ranked News Feed and further studied users’ choices to click through to ideologically discordant
content. Compared with algorithmic ranking, individuals’ choices played a stronger role in
limiting exposure to cross-cutting content.
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