Echo chambers online?: Politically motivated selective exposure among Internet news users

TLDR

A review of research suggests that the desire for opinion reinforcement may play a more important role in shaping individuals' exposure to online political information than an aversion to opinion challenge. The study tests whether opinion reinforcement drives online political exposure. It does so by collecting web-based behavior‑tracking data from 727 readers of two partisan online news sites. Results show that opinion‑reinforcing content increases news story exposure, while opinion‑challenging content only slightly reduces it, and that once a story is chosen, disagreement does not lead to abandonment; overall, the influence of both factors is modest but reinforcement is a stronger predictor.

Abstract

A review of research suggests that the desire for opinion reinforcement may play a more important role in shaping individuals' exposure to online political information than an aversion to opinion challenge. The article tests this idea using data collected via a web-administered behavior-tracking study with subjects recruited from the readership of 2 partisan online news sites (N = 727). The results demonstrate that opinion-reinforcing information promotes news story exposure while opinion-challenging information makes exposure only marginally less likely. The influence of both factors is modest, but opinion-reinforcing information is a more important predictor. Having decided to view a news story, evidence of an aversion to opinion challenges disappears: There is no evidence that individuals abandon news stories that contain information with which they disagree. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.