Today’s high-choice digital media environments allow citizens to completely refrain from online news exposure and, if they do use news, to select sources that align with their ideological preferences. Yet due to measurement problems and cross-country differences, recent research has been inconclusive regarding the prevalence of ideological self-selection into like-minded online news. We introduce a multi-method design combining the web-browsing histories and survey responses of more than 7000 participants from six major democracies with supervised text classification to separate political from nonpolitical news exposure. We find that political online news exposure is both substantially less prevalent and subject to stronger ideological self-selection than nonpolitical online news exposure, especially in the United States. By highlighting the peculiar role of political news content, the results improve the understanding of online news exposure and the role of digital media in democracy.

中文翻译：

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网络新闻曝光中的意识形态自我选择：来自欧洲和美国的证据


今天高选择的数字媒体环境允许公民完全避免在线新闻曝光，如果他们确实使用新闻，可以选择符合他们意识形态偏好的来源。然而，由于测量问题和跨国差异，最近的研究对于意识形态自我选择对志同道合的在线新闻的普遍性尚无定论。我们引入了一种多方法设计，将来自 6 个主要民主国家的 7000 多名参与者的 Web 浏览历史和调查回复与监督文本分类相结合，以区分政治和非政治新闻曝光。我们发现，与非政治在线新闻相比，政治在线新闻曝光的普遍性要低得多，并且受到更强的意识形态自我选择的影响，尤其是在美国。通过强调政治新闻内容的特殊作用，结果提高了对在线新闻曝光和数字媒体在民主中的作用的理解。