The Plurality of Information Consumption Habits on Digital Social Networks. Are All Media Agents Equally Polarising?
Keywords:
Echo Chambers, Information Environment, Selective Exposure, Opinion Leaders, Alternative Media, Polarisation, TwitterAbstract
In studies on political polarization, attention has been drawn to the potential negative impact of the increasing prevalence of media outlets and diverse information and opinion consumption choices. The theories of selective exposure and findings regarding the presence of echo chambers on social networks allow us to characterize some of the dynamics that arise in the new informational environments of the digital era. Whether information and opinion exposure are effectively polarized along partisan lines is a question whose answer depends, in part, on the methodologies and information sources considered. In this research, the information exposure preferences of a sample of politicized users on the social network Twitter have been studied. The various agents in the informational environment, ranging from traditional media to new alternative opinion leaders, have been used as the variable of interest. To analyze the degree of polarization, a network of duplicated friendship relationships has been constructed to assess patterns of shared audiences in users' deliberate exposure. The structure of exposure reveals a strong partisan polarization, mainly around the left-right axis. On the other hand, it has been observed that the new agents have more polarized audiences than traditional ones, suggesting an incentive to adopt more radical political positions. The results underscore the relevance of the informational environment in political polarization processes.
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