Diverse Opinion Exposure on SNS: Investigating the Role of Ideological Extremity, Political Involvement, and Online Networks

Background: SNS offer a new space where citizens can easily self-select and personalize their political news consumption. This has raised concerns about decreasing levels of diverse opinion exposure, since humans tend to avoid opinion-challenging information (e.g., Stroud, 2008). While there is growing evidence that SNS don’t per se hinder exposure to diverse opinions (e.g., Bakshy, Messing, & Adamic, 2015), the question remains which individuals on SNS tend to approach or avoid attitude diversity. In this study, we argue that three key sets of individual predictors may influence opinion diversity on SNS: First, according to ideological rigidity and preference for certainty arguments, ideological extremity on both ends may decrease opinion diversity. Second, network characteristics (such as size and political networks) may influence the existence of weak ties and diverse political preferences, both contributing to opinion diversity. Finally, political involvement (political interest, knowledge, and participation) has been linked to both more openness and more resistance to attitude-challenging opinions. Method: We conducted a quota-based two-wave panel study with a representative sample in the context of the Austrian national election 2017 (N(w2) = 559). We measured attitude-consistent and attitude-challenging exposure with two subitems each and created a relative exposure measure from these two variables: relative measure = consistent / (consistent + challenging). Analysis/Results: We ran OLS regression models with lagged dependent variables (controlling for autoregressive effects). Our findings suggest that ideological extremity significantly increases both exposure to attitude-consistent as well as the relative share of attitude-consistent over inconsistent exposure. However, this tendency was slightly more pronounced for individuals at the right than at the left ideological end. While larger network size and more politically oriented networks significantly increased exposure to both attitude-consistent and challenging opinions, heterogeneous networks (composed of people from different social classes) significantly increased the share of attitude-challenging exposure. Finally, the data indicate that both political knowledge and low-effort political participation significantly increase attitude-consistent exposure and that higher knowledge in particular predicted an increase in the relative share of attitude-consistent over challenging exposure. Discussion: Taken together, our results indicate that ideological extremity, higher political knowledge, homogeneous SNS networks, and low-effort political participation are significant predictors of selective exposure on SNS. These findings extend previous research by demonstrating that some individuals may take greater advantage of personalizing tools on SNS and curate their newsfeed to avoid attitude-challenging exposure. Interestingly, also political knowledge and low-effort political participation tended to increase attitude-consistent share, indicating that political education may not necessarily make citizens more open to diverse opinions. Although more evidence is needed, our results may be some ingredients of deliberative and participatory democracy that predict selective exposure to attitude-consistent content, which makes the relation between SNS use and so called “echo chambers” more complex than previously thought. References Bakshy, E., Messing, S., & Adamic, L. A. (2015). Political science. Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook. Science, 348(6239), 1130–1132. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaa1160 Stroud, N. J. (2008). Media Use and Political Predispositions: Revisiting the Concept of Selective Exposure. Political Behavior, 30(3), 341–366. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-007-9050-9