ArticlePloS one2020
Selective exposure shapes the Facebook news diet.
Article in PloS one, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed.
- Factors Associated With Nurses' Self-Reported Susceptibility to Online Health Misinformation: Evidence From Greece.International nursing review · 2026Observational
- Measuring narrative polarization in online discourse.PNAS nexus · 2026Article
- The psychological motivation of users actively constructing information cocoons from the perspective of Adler's teleology: an empirical study based on a sample of Chinese university students.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Ideology and polarization set the agenda on social media.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Social Media and the Evolution of Vaccine Preferences During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Discrete Choice Experiment.JMIR infodemiology · 2025Article
- Unveiling the drivers of active participation in social media discourse.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Evaluating the effect of viral posts on social media engagement.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- A multilevel network approach to revealing patterns of online political selective exposure.PloS one · 2025Article
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- Article
- Cross-platform social dynamics: an analysis of ChatGPT and COVID-19 vaccine conversations.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- The event-driven nature of online political hostility: How offline political events make online interactions more hostile.PNAS nexus · 2023Article
- Global Misinformation Spillovers in the Vaccination Debate Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Multilingual Twitter Study.JMIR infodemiology · 2023Article
- Article
- Topic selectivity and adaptivity promote spreading of short messages.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Users' polarisation in dynamic discussion networks: The case of refugee crisis in Sweden.PloS one · 2022Article
- The COVID-19 pandemic and the search for structure: Social media and conspiracy theories.Social and personality psychology compass · 2021Article
- The echo chamber effect on social media.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- A complex systems perspective of news recommender systems: Guiding emergent outcomes with feedback models.PloS one · 2021Article
- The COVID-19 social media infodemic.Scientific reports · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The social brain hypothesis approximates the total number of social relationships we are able to maintain at 150. Similar cognitive constraints emerge in several aspects of our daily life, from our mobility to the way we communicate, and might even affect the way we consume information online. Indeed, despite the unprecedented amount of information we can access online, our attention span still remains limited. Furthermore, recent studies have shown that online users are more likely to ignore dissenting information, choosing instead to interact with information adhering to their own point of view. In this paper, we quantitatively analyse users' attention economy in news consumption on social media by analysing 14 million users interacting with 583 news outlets (pages) on Facebook over a time span of six years. In particular, we explore how users distribute their activity across news pages and topics. On the one hand, we find that, independently of their activity, users show a tendency to follow a very limited number of pages. On the other hand, users tend to interact with almost all the topics presented by their favoured pages. Finally, we introduce a taxonomy accounting for users' behaviour to distinguish between patterns of selective exposure and interest. Our findings suggest that segregation of users in echo chambers might be an emerging effect of users' activity on social media and that selective exposure-i.e. the tendency of users to consume information adhering to their preferred narratives-could be a major driver in their consumption patterns.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.