Anatomy of news consumption on Facebook
Open accessAbstract
Significance: Social media heavily changed the way we get informed and shape our opinions. Users’ polarization seems to dominate news consumption on Facebook. Through a massive analysis on 920 news outlets and 376 million users, we explore the anatomy of news consumption on Facebook on a global scale. We show that users tend to confine their attention on a limited set of pages, thus determining a sharp community structure among news outlets. Furthermore, our findings suggest that users have a more cosmopolitan perspective of the information space than news providers. We conclude with a simple model of selective exposure that well reproduces the observed connectivity patterns.
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Feed algorithms might limit our selection process by suggesting contents similar to the ones we are usually exposed to.
“Our attention span remains limited (9, 10), and feed algorithms might limit our selection process by suggesting contents similar to the ones we are usually exposed to (11–13).”
From The echo chamber effect on social media (2021) · cites this paper as [11]
Online media has become a widespread source of information and opinion formation.
“With the advent of the Internet, online media has become a widespread source of information and, subsequently, opinion formation5–9.”
From Negativity drives online news consumption (2023) · cites this paper as [6]
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- Authors
- Schmidt, A. L., Zollo, F., Del Vicario, M., Bessi, A., Scala, A., Caldarelli, G., Stanley, H. E., & Quattrociocchi, W.
- Affiliations
- IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca (IT)
- Laboratory of Computational Social Science, Networks Department, IMT Alti Studi Lucca, 55100 Lucca, Italy;
- Istituto Universitario di Studi Superiori di Pavia (IT)
- Department of Physics, Boston University, Boston, MA 02115
- ORCID
- Venue
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Publisher
- National Academy of Sciences
- Published
- 2017-03-06
- Volume
- 114
- Issue
- 12
- Pages
- 3035-3039
- ISSN
- 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
- 1091-6490
- PMC
- PMC5373354
- OpenAlex
- W2594227947
- Cited by
- 305
- References
- 27
- Citations by year
- 2026: 11 · 2025: 32 · 2024: 26 · 2023: 36 · 2022: 35 · 2021: 48 · 2020: 45 · 2019: 33 · 2018: 26 · 2017: 10 · 2016: 2
- FWCI
- 16.18
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- IRIS Research product catalog (Sapienza University of Rome) (submittedVersion)
- ARCA (Università Ca' Foscari Venezia) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Physics and Astronomy › Statistical and Nonlinear Physics › Complex Network Analysis Techniques
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
- Social Sciences › Communication › Social Media and Politics
- Keywords
- news consumption, Facebook, social media, selective exposure, user preferences, geolocation, information space, opinion formation
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