Investigating the effects of news sharing and political interest on social media network heterogeneity
Introduction
Communications with those who hold politically dissimilar views from one’s own are valuable experiences. Theorists of democracy have stressed the importance of such opportunities in facilitating the formation of more informed and thoughtful opinions. Citizens are better able to inform themselves about an issue when they can correct their own errors through contrasting their ideas with those of others (Mill, 1956[1859]), and they are also able to reach more valid conclusions when they consider different perspectives (Arendt, 1968). These potential benefits that result from a diversity of communication within a society may fulfill the ideals of a public sphere (Habermas, 1989[1962]) and deliberative democracy (Fishkin, 1997). Furthermore, encounters with people of diverse views build “shared experiences” among citizens, which in turn contributes to social cohesion (Sunstein, 2007, Sunstein, 2012).
Mass media have traditionally undertaken the role of exposing audiences to varied points of view which differ from their own (Sunstein, 2007, Sunstein, 2012). However, the changing media environment, in which media outlets and information-filtering tools are abundant, has been considered to facilitate selective exposure to only like-minded people and information (Iyengar and Hahn, 2009, Knobloch-Westerwick and Meng, 2009, Knobloch-Westerwick and Meng, 2011, Stroud, 2007, Stroud, 2010). When individuals are deprived of opportunities to interact with divergent people, the society will become more fragmented and polarized, thus constituting a serious threat to democracy (Sunstein, 2007, Tewksbury and Rittenberg, 2012).
Social media (or social networking services, SNSs), one of the newest media, have yet again complicated the discussion about exposure to diverse points of view in the new media environment. One particularly interesting observation along this line of research is that people are indeed able to expand the diversity of their interpersonal connections via SNSs, but only when they frequently consume news on these services (e.g., Lee, Choi, Kim, & Kim, 2014). However, previous studies have paid little attention to the fact that news consumption on SNSs is a totally different experience. Users not only receive news via SNSs, but are also able to disseminate news by sharing links to stories with one another. In other words, these sharing types of news use on SNSs encompass more unconventional, more diverse, and more participatory ways of news consumption. Thus, it is necessary to investigate the ways in which these new patterns of news consumption made possible through SNSs serve as a link between SNS use and exposure to diverse points of view within communication networks. In this sense, this study aims to explore the mechanism of how social media use relates to network heterogeneity by focusing on the peculiar characteristics of news use on SNSs.
Furthermore, it is unlikely that news-related use of social media has the same consequences for all users. In the digital media setting, where a wider range of choices is given to audiences, political interest is likely to intervene in the relationship between SNS news use and the extent of exposure to diverse opinions. This is because news consumers’ tendency to select information which is congenial to themselves is known to become more pronounced when increased media choice is coupled with a high level of political interest (Farrell, 2012, Iyengar and Hahn, 2009, Prior, 2007). However, it is questionable whether this pattern will be observed in the context of the newer types of news consumption available through SNSs. Hence, the second goal of this study is to test the influence of interest and thus reveal a more detailed mapping of the relationship between social media use and network heterogeneity.
It is hoped that this study will contribute to the better understanding of the political implications of social media use by exploring the unique ways of news use within online social networks. In particular, we propose a model which posits that SNS use indirectly affects SNS network heterogeneity through news sharing that is also moderated by political interest. This model is tested with a data set from a national probability survey which was conducted in 2012.
Section snippets
Exposure to different views on social media
The relationship between social media use and network heterogeneity is unclear, due to inconsistent research findings. Some research has found that social media is likely to promote interactions with like-minded others (e.g., Aiello et al., 2012, Conover et al., 2011). SNSs may enhance the human tendency toward dissonance minimization (Festinger, 1957, Klapper, 1960) by allowing people to weed out non-likeminded people from their online networks. This is feasible due to the presence of sorting
Data
In order to test the hypotheses proposed above, the present study analyzed a national survey of adults across the U.S. conducted from May 3 to May 10, 2012. Respondents were recruited by a professional organization, Clear Voice Research, from representative online panels. In order to achieve a more accurate reflection of the U.S. population, the sampling was based on two U.S. Census variables: gender and age. The respondents consisted of 1032 adult Americans, with 52% of the respondents being
Results
To test our hypotheses, we employed an OLS regression model and a bootstrapping technique. In addition to that, we also specified a moderated mediation model, which integrates the mediation and moderation analyses.
For the regression models, political interest along with control variables (demographics, political characteristics, and media use) were entered into the models first, followed by news internalizing, externalizing, and, finally, the interaction terms (news internalizing × political
Discussion
The present study investigated whether the increasingly popular use of SNSs promotes or restricts the likelihood of encounters with dissimilar points of view. To accomplish that, we focused on (1) the role played by two dimensions of news sharing – news internalizing and externalizing – and (2) individuals’ levels of political interest. The results show, first, that frequent SNS use entails a greater chance of interacting with heterogeneous others; however, the influence is only indirectly
Acknowledgments
The data set was collected through a collaborative project of the Communication Research Group (CRG), housed in the School of Journalism at Indiana University. We thank the CRG for making the data available.
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