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Scholars and observers attribute many democratic benefits to local news media. This paper examines exposure to local and national news media websites, side-by-side in one model, testing their over-time effects on political participation, knowledge, and affective and attitude polarization. We test whether traditionally disengaged or disadvantaged groups (i.e., racial minorities, those with low education levels, politically disinterested, and those who do not consume national news), may particularly benefit from local news consumption. To this end, we combine three-wave panel surveys (final N = 740) with 9 months worth of web browsing data submitted by the same participants (36 million visits). We identify exposure to local and national news sites using an extensive list of news domains. The results offer a robust pattern of null findings. Actual online exposure to local news has no over-time effects on the tested outcomes. Also, exposure to local news sites does not exert especially strong effects among the tested sub-groups. We attribute these results to the fact that news visits account for a small fraction of citizens’ online activities, less than 2% in our trace data. Our project suggests the need to evaluate the effects of local news consumption on the individual level.

Increased media choices in the digital age allow people to select the content they prefer, and the majority choose to consume entertainment rather than politics (Wojcieszak, Casas, Yu, Nagler, & Tucker, 2022). Because lack of exposure to news and politics can lead to uninformed and disengaged citizens, voting misaligned with individual and group interests, and greater susceptibility to misinformation and populism (Achen & Bartels, 2006; Bartels, 1996; Fording & Schram, 2017), it is important to encourage greater exposure to current affairs. However, politically disinterested citizens cannot select news and politics on social media because they do not have such content in their inventory (Thorson, Cotter, Medeiros, & Pak, 2021). In order to generate exposure to current affairs on platforms, it is thus essential to encourage users to follow news and political accounts, which – in turn – creates political content inventory. This project focuses on incentivizing such following and also tests the democratic effects of increased exposure to news and politics. To test the effectiveness of our strategy to promote the following of news and political accounts on social media and to test the effects of enhanced political exposure, we recruit 2000 participants in the US to take part in an online experiment that entailed ”testing” a new professionally developed social media site (”Bebo”). The mock platform allows the participants to first follow various popular accounts, ranging from celebrities (e.g. Katy Perry), sports figures (e.g., LeBron James) to news organizations (e.g., USA Today) and national politicians (e.g., Joe Biden), thereby customizing their social media feed, and to later browse the site, which displays recent posts of the accounts they had followed. Participants were randomly assigned to two treatment conditions or the control. Our treatments, which appear as realistic pop-ups on the feed every minute, prime the importance of consuming news by emphasizing its benefits to society and democracy at large (i.e., public interest nudges) or to the individuals themselves (i.e., self-interest nudges). Every three posts, the site also features four ’suggested accounts to follow,’ two of which are news/political and two of which are not. We test whether the nudges encourage people to follow more news/political accounts. We also examine the democratic effects of increased exposure to news and politics, testing both positive outcomes (i.e., intended political participation and self-perceived political knowledge) and also the potential side effects of news exposure (i.e., perceived polarization, affective polarization, and meta-prejudice).

In the era of unprecedented polarization, misinformation, and growing support for partisan violence and declining support for democratic norms (Lazer et al., 2018; Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017; Kalmoe & Mason, 2022; Graham & Svolik, 2020), most scholars and public observers focus on partisan media, fake news, and radical, harmful, or conspiratorial online content (e.g., Guess, Barber ́a, Munzert, & Yang, 2021; Tandoc Jr, Lim, & Ling, 2020; Enders et al., 2021). The drastically overlooked problem, which underlies the other challenges facing the U.S. and the globe, is that of very low consumption of quality news content among the population. Most people do not attend to news (Allen, Howland, Mobius, Rothschild, & Watts, 2020; Wojcieszak et al., 2021) and, if they do, they consume content that is sensationalist, click- baity, and mostly junk (Meta, 2022). Such low levels of quality news consumption lead to uninformed citizenry, voting misaligned with individual interests, and populace that is susceptible to misinformation and populist rhetoric (Bartels, 1996; Achen & Bartels, 2006; Fording & Schram, 2017). As such, incentivizing greater consumption of verified and quality news among citizens is pressing. This project aims to test computational interventions aimed at incentivizing citizen ex- posure to verified and quality news on social media. We test two complimentary approaches that could increase quality news consumption and – in so doing – also aim to disentangle two interrelated factors that may underlie low news consumption: biases in recommender sys- tems and the disinterest of individual citizens. Does increasing news consumption necessitate nudges to the recommender system or to users themselves? If low levels of news consump- tion are mostly due to algorithmic biases that reinforce users’ non-political interests (e.g., users who are not politically inclined are mostly recommended videos about sports, cars, or celebrities?; unintentional news avoidance; (Skovsgaard & Andersen, 2020)), then tweaking the algorithm in a way that encourages recommendations to quality news content could in- crease news consumption simply because more inventory would be available in users’ social media ecosystem. If however, it is the users’ political apathy, in that people are avoiding news because it is boring, negative, overly divisive, not reliable, or seen as too far removed from their daily lives (Skovsgaard & Andersen, 2020; Tsfati & Cappella, 2003; Palmer & Toff, 2020), reminding the users of the personal and democratic benefits of news consumption could encourage greater news exposure. We specifically focus on YouTube, which is one of the largest social media platforms, with 1.7 billion unique monthly visitors and 14.3 billion visits per month, more than Facebook, Wikipedia, Amazon and Instagram. YouTube is also the most popular platform in the US, used by 72% of the U.S. population (Walker & Matsa, 2022) and one of two, in addition to Reddit, that saw significant growth since 2019, with a steadily growing user base (Auxier & Anderson, 2022). However, only 30% of YouTube users get news regularly from the site (Walker & Matsa, 2022).

Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-ijpp-10.1177_19401612211047194 for No Polarization From Partisan News: Over-Time Evidence From Trace Data by Magdalena Wojcieszak and Sjifra de Leeuw, Ericka Menchen-Trevino, Seungsu Lee, Ke M. Huang-Isherwood, Brian Weeks in The International Journal of Press/Politics

Most scholars focus on the prevalence and democratic effects of (partisan) news exposure. This focus misses large parts of online activities of a majority of politically disinterested citizens. Although political content also appears outside of news outlets and may profoundly shape public opinion, its prevalence and effects are under-studied at scale. This project combines three-wave panel survey data from three countries (total N = 6,892) with online behavioral data from the same participants (119.7M visits). We create a multi-lingual classifier to identify political content both in news and outside (e.g. in shopping or entertainment sites). We find that news consumption is infrequent: just 3.4% of participants’ online browsing comprised visits to news sites. Only between 14% (NL) and 36% (US) of these visits were to hard news. The overwhelming majority of participants' visits were to non-news sites. Although only 1.6% of those visits related to politics, in absolute terms, citizens encounter politics more frequently outside of news than within news. Out of every 10 visits to political content, 3 come from news and 7 from non-news sites. Furthermore, non-news exposure to political content had the same – and in some cases stronger - associations with key democratic attitudes and behaviors as news exposure. These findings offer a comprehensive analysis of the online political (not solely news) ecosystem and demonstrate the importance of assessing the prevalence and effects of political content in non-news sources.

The purpose of this project is to examine how incidental emotions – affect that is situationally induced in a recent past that is normatively irrelevant to the target object (Andrade & Ariely, 2009; Small & Lerner, 2008) - influence affective polarization. More specifically, we investigate the effects of incidental happiness on affective polarization and on selective exposure (and on affective polarization indirectly through content selection). We also examine three other classes of societally consequential outcomes: endorsement of conspiracy beliefs and belief in fake news (i.e., deep fake videos) in Experiment 1, and also political behaviors on social media across both experiments. Two online experiments are proposed in three countries (US, Poland, and the Netherlands): Study 1 focuses on happiness’s direct influence on affective polarization and conspiracy and fake-news related beliefs, as well as social media behaviors; Study 2 investigates its indirect effects on affective polarization through the selection of pro-attitudinal, balanced, or counter-attitudinal news stories, and also on the indirect effects on political social media behaviors.

Many scholars accept that democracies function best when citizens are up-to-date on political events and knowledgeable about the issues of the day (e.g., Delli Carpini & Keeter, 1996). Thus, news exposure has been seen as normatively beneficial, and citizens are expected to attend to the news (as reected, for instance, in social desirability bias leading to overreporting of news consumption in survey self-reports; Prior, 2009). Yet, the current media environment makes it possible for citizens to avoid news altogether, which could decrease political knowledge and engagement (Delli Carpini & Keeter, 1996). It may be equally problematic that those who decide to tune in to political outlets have unprecedented opportunity to consume like-minded news, which may in part be to blame for increasing attitude (e.g., Levendusky, 2013) and affective polarization, or the animosity between people who identify with opposing political parties (e.g., Garrett et al., 2014). In this project, we problematize the notion of news exposure being necessarily democratically desirable and, in so doing, we offer a novel take on the problem of polarization. We propose that increasing people's news exposure will exacerbate both attitude and affective polarization. We rely on group identity as a major mechanism underlying these effects. As people are exposed to news, political issues, parties, policies, and different sociopolitical groups become more salient in their minds, regardless of the ideology of the news consumed. Therefore, people learn and/or are reminded of the positions of their political in-group as well as the out-group. Because people tend to use group cues and their own political identity to make sense of the political world, they often adopt an opinion that more closely matches their in-group, increasing attitude polarization. During this process, group identity also becomes more salient, increasing affective polarization or negative attitudes toward the political out-group. We also suspect that increasing news exposure will lead to more negative perceptions of the political system, lowering support for compromise and also increasing perceived levels of polarization and of attribution to negative intentions to the out-party (i.e., attribution of malevolence). In addition to these effects, we also explore the effects of increased news consumption on an under-studied factor, namely individual general well-being. Finally, in order to provide a balanced perspective on the impact of news, we also address the expected democratically beneffcial effects of increased political knowledge and participatory intentions. In sum, this project addresses a fundamental question: "In what ways is news of any kind harmful, and in what ways is it beneffcial?" To test these effects, we incentivized participants in our ongoing panel to increase their news consumption for 12 days (the treatment). We include this experiment at the end of the second wave of a 3-wave panel study in Poland. 2,138 respondents completed wave 1 and were invited to the second wave. We randomly assign wave 2 respondents into this "more news" treatment group with a .6 probability. The rest are assigned to a control group and do not receive any instructions regarding altering their news diet. Our approach is novel in that we look at the effects of increasing news consumption in general (i.e., altering an individual's news diet) as opposed to the effect of exposure to a single article or browsing session, using an experimental design in a naturalistic setting. This may also be the first study to address various distinct effects of news consumption using both self-reported measures as well as observational methods in the form of online browsing data that the study participants voluntarily submitted. In the analyses, we aim to establish the effects of increasing news exposure while also testing whether these effects depend on people's prior levels of (likeminded) news consumption.

Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-hij-10.1177_19401612211009160 for Avenues to News and Diverse News Exposure Online: Comparing Direct Navigation, Social Media, News Aggregators, Search Queries, and Article Hyperlinks by Magdalena Wojcieszak, Ericka Menchen-Trevino, Joao F. F. Goncalves and Brian Weeks in The International Journal of Press/Politics

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-nms-10.1177_14614448211033300 for Partisan media, untrustworthy news sites, and political misperceptions by Brian E Weeks, Ericka Menchen-Trevino, Christopher Calabrese, Andreu Casas and Magdalena Wojcieszak in New Media & Society