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Cited by 267

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 61 of the 61 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

The Myth of Partisan Selective Exposure: A Portrait of the Online Political News Audience

Open access
Nelson, Jacob L., Webster, James G.·2017·Social Media + Society

Abstract

Many assume that in a digital environment with a wide range of ideologically tinged news outlets, partisan selective exposure to like-minded speech is pervasive and a primary cause of political polarization. Yet, partisan selective exposure research tends to stem from experimental or self-reported data, which limits the applicability of their findings in a high-choice media environment. We explore observed online audience behavior data to present a portrait of the actual online political news audience. We find that this audience frequently navigates to news sites from Facebook, and that it congregates among a few popular, well-known political news sites. We also find that political news sites comprise ideologically diverse audiences, and that they share audiences with nearly all smaller, more ideologically extreme outlets. Our results call into question the strength of the so-called red/blue divide in actual web use.

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Metadata

Authors
Nelson, J. L., & Webster, J. G.
Venue
Social Media + Society
Published
2017-07
Volume
3
Issue
3
ISSN
2056-3051 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W2753353351
Cited by
267
References
61
FWCI
43.33
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
gold

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The Myth of Partisan Selective Exposure: A Portrait of the Online Political News Audience. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1177/2056305117729314
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Nelson, J. L., & Webster, J. G. (2017). The Myth of Partisan Selective Exposure: A Portrait of the Online Political News Audience. Social Media + Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305117729314

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.