ArticleScientific reports2023
The role of the big geographic sort in online news circulation among U.S. Reddit users.
Article in Scientific reports, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 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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Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed, 6 citations in OpenAlex.
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Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Past research has attributed the circulation of online news to two main factors-individual characteristics (e.g., a person's information literacy) and social media effects (e.g., algorithm-mediated information diffusion)-and has overlooked a third one: the critical mass created by the offline self-segregation of Americans into like-minded geographical regions such as states (a phenomenon called 'The Big Sort'). We hypothesized that this latter factor matters for the online spreading of news not least because online interactions, despite having the potential of being global, end up being localized: interaction probability is known to rapidly decay with distance. Upon analysis of more than 8M Reddit comments containing news links spanning four years, from January 2016 to December 2019, we found that Reddit did not work as an 'hype machine' for news (as opposed to what previous work reported for other platforms, circulation was not mainly caused by platform-facilitated network effects). Rather, news circulation in Reddit worked as a supply-and-demand system: news items scaled linearly with the number of users in each state (with a scaling exponent [Formula: see text] [Formula: see text], and a goodness of fit [Formula: see text]). Furthermore, deviations from such a universal pattern were best explained by state-level personality and cultural factors ([Formula: see text]), rather than socioeconomic conditions ([Formula: see text]) or political characteristics ([Formula: see text]). Higher-than-expected circulation of any type of news was found in states characterised by residents who tend to be less diligent in terms of their personality (low in conscientiousness) and by loose cultures understating the importance of adherence to norms (low in cultural tightness). Interestingly, the combination of those factors with low levels of education was then associated with the circulation of a particular type of news, that is, misinformation. These results suggest that online interactions are geographically bounded and, as such, news circulation cannot be studied purely as an Internet phenomenon but should be grounded into a user's offline cultural environment, which has become increasingly segregated over the decades, and is admittedly hard to change.
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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.