APPLIED MICRO: The slant of online news; Dr Luca Braghieri (Bocconi University)

Abstract

The increased reliance on social media for news consumption has generated widespread concern. In particular, many worry that the structure of the social network and the algorithm governing users’ newsfeeds leads to the formation of “echo-chambers” and “filter-bubbles” that promote the consumption of partisan news (Sunstein, 2017). Although almost ubiquitous in the popular press, worries about polarized news consumption on social media have received relatively little empirical substantiation from the academic literature (Guess, Nyhan, and Reifer, 2018). In this paper: i) we propose and implement a new method to assign slant to individual news articles; ii) we show that our fine-grained measure of slant delivers an estimate of the degree of polarization in news consumption on Facebook that is substantially higher than the estimates obtained with the coarser measures commonly employed in the literature.