CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 53Social Media and PoliticsMedia Influence and PoliticsNews Media Framing and Political Communication

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 7 of the 7 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Non-News Websites Expose People to More Political Content Than News Websites: Evidence from Browsing Data in Three Countries

Open access
Wojcieszak, Magdalena, Menchen-Trevino, Ericka, Clemm von Hohenberg, Bernhard, de Leeuw, Sjifra, Gonçalves, João, Davidson, Sam, Gonçalves, Alexandre·2024·Political Communication
DOI 10.1080/10584609.2023.2238641PMC PMC10721223
Open this paper in CoChat — free accountOpen PDF

Abstract

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 = 7,266) with online behavioral data from the same participants (over 106M 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 news about politics. 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, 3.4 come from news and 6.6 from non-news sites. Furthermore, exposure to political content outside news domains 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.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1080/10584609.2023.2238641

Cites

7 of 7 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Whether users are using their chronological or engagement-based timeline may have a large influence on their exposure to traditional news outlets.

    “Thus, whether users are using their chronlogical or engagement-based timeline may have a large influence on their exposure to traditional news outlets [53].”

    From Twitter's Algorithm: Amplifying Anger, Animosity, and Affective Polarization (2023) · cites this paper as [53]

    The Behavioral Measures section says the study could not access participants’ Facebook News Feeds or Twitter timelines; it measured visits to news organizations instead (page not provided). The provided passages and searches for chronological and engagement-based feeds contain no comparison of those timeline types or their influence on exposure to traditional news outlets. (LLM, conf=0.76)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Research works printed but not linked: 72

  1. 10.1177/1940161213485990 · DOI
  2. Achen, C. H., & Bartels, L. M. (2006). It feels like we’re thinking: The rationalizing voter and electoral democracy. Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, PA, USA, 30.
  3. 10.1080/15205436.2019.1585544 · DOI
  4. 10.1177/0093650209346805 · DOI
  5. 10.2307/2111700 · DOI
  6. 10.1080/10584600390211181 · DOI
  7. 10.1111/j.1468-2508.2006.00482.x · DOI
  8. 10.1177/0267323120978724 · DOI
  9. 10.1093/biomet/93.3.491 · DOI · Paper page
  10. 10.2307/j.ctvc77mcz · DOI
  11. 10.1111/jcom.12127 · DOI
  12. 10.1177/0002716296546001007 · DOI
  13. 10.1177/009365094021003004 · DOI
  14. Delli Carpini, M. X., & Keeter, S. (1996). What Americans know about politics and why it matters. Yale University Press.
  15. 10.1086/257897 · DOI · Paper page
  16. 10.1086/715603 · DOI · Paper page
  17. 10.1017/S0003055412000500 · DOI · Paper page
  18. 10.1177/1065912917744895 · DOI · Paper page
  19. 10.1080/19312458.2013.813923 · DOI
  20. 10.1080/07393148.2017.1378295 · DOI
  21. 10.1111/ajps.12589 · DOI · Paper page
  22. 10.1073/pnas.2013464118 · DOI · Paper page
  23. 10.1017/CBO9780511790867 · DOI
  24. 10.1177/1461444819850755 · DOI
  25. 10.1177/14614448211063899 · DOI
  26. 10.1016/j.chb.2017.06.041 · DOI
  27. 10.1207/s15506878jobem5002_1 · DOI
  28. 10.1093/poq/nfy014 · DOI · Paper page
  29. 10.1017/9781108923323 · DOI · Paper page
  30. 10.1177/0894439320920790 · DOI
  31. 10.1177/107769908406100201 · DOI
  32. 10.1111/ajps.12008 · DOI · Paper page
  33. 10.1080/10584609.2015.1038455 · DOI · Paper page
  34. 10.9776/16611 · DOI
  35. 10.1080/21670811.2020.1829978 · DOI
  36. 10.1207/s15327825mcs0802_3 · DOI
  37. 10.1007/s11109-015-9318-4 · DOI
  38. Mutz, D. C. (2006). How the mass media divide us. Brookings Institution Press.
  39. 10.1017/S000305540707044X · DOI
  40. 10.1093/joc/jqac008 · DOI
  41. 10.1177/1940161218771902 · DOI
  42. Newman, N., Fletcher, R., Kalogeropoulos, A., & Kleis Nielsen, R. (2019). Reuters institute digital news report 2019. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. https://www.digitalnewsreport.org/survey/2019/
  43. 10.1111/j.1540-5907.2011.00541.x · DOI · Paper page
  44. 10.1017/CBO9780511609343 · DOI
  45. 10.1080/21670811.2019.1697625 · DOI
  46. 10.1177/2056305119872956 · DOI
  47. 10.1080/10584600390211172 · DOI
  48. 10.1111/j.1540-5907.2005.00143.x · DOI
  49. 10.1017/CBO9781139878425 · DOI
  50. 10.1146/annurev-polisci-100711-135242 · DOI · Paper page
  51. 10.1145/358916.361990 · DOI
  52. 10.1080/1369118X.2017.1305427 · DOI
  53. 10.1017/9781108560573 · DOI · Paper page
  54. 10.1080/1461670X.2019.1686410 · DOI
  55. 10.1177/1077699016679975 · DOI
  56. 10.1017/S0003055421001222 · DOI
  57. 10.1080/14616700500131950 · DOI
  58. 10.1111/j.1475-6765.2009.01913.x · DOI
  59. 10.1177/107769900107800309 · DOI
  60. 10.1177/1464884920915352 · DOI
  61. Tocqueville, A. D. (1863). Democracy in America [Google-books-ID: xZfibezcptec]. Sever; Francis.
  62. 10.1093/poq/nfaa016 · DOI
  63. 10.1177/1461444815616223 · DOI
  64. 10.1080/21670811.2020.1767509 · DOI
  65. 10.1080/21670811.2021.1904266 · DOI
  66. 10.1177/1940161221991550 · DOI
  67. 10.1177/0894439315609528 · DOI
  68. 10.1177/19401612211047194 · DOI
  69. 10.1177/19401612211009160 · DOI
  70. 10.1111/j.1460-2466.2008.01403.x · DOI
  71. 10.1057/s41599-022-01423-x · DOI
  72. 10.1073/pnas.2006089117 · DOI · Paper page

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Metadata

Authors
Wojcieszak, M., Menchen-Trevino, E., Clemm von Hohenberg, B., de Leeuw, S., Gonçalves, J., Davidson, S., & Gonçalves, A.
Affiliations
  • University of California, Davis (US)
  • American University (US)
  • GESIS – Leibniz-Institute for the Social Sciences, Mannheim, Germany
  • Ministry of Finance (NL)
  • Erasmus University Rotterdam (NL)
  • University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (US)
Corresponding author
Wojcieszak, Magdalena
ORCID
Venue
Political Communication
Publisher
Informa UK Limited
Published
2023-08-10
Volume
41
Issue
1
Pages
129-151
ISSN
  • 1058-4609 (ISSN-L)
  • 1091-7675
DOI
10.1080/10584609.2023.2238641
PMC
PMC10721223
OpenAlex
W4385724492
Cited by
53
References
7
Citations by year
2026: 16 · 2025: 15 · 2024: 17 · 2023: 5
FWCI
25.08
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
  • Political Communication (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
  • PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • EUR Research Repository (Erasmus University Rotterdam) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
  • OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
  • OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) (submittedVersion)
Funders
The work was supported by the European Research Council
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Communication › Social Media and Politics
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Media Influence and Politics
  • Social Sciences › Communication › News Media Framing and Political Communication
Keywords
online news consumption, political information seeking, democratic attitudes, democratic participation

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review