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Invited by the Catalan Associación of Journalists, based in Barcelona, I sat in a round table to talk about the prevalence of echo-chambers in the online domain. The discussion brough together journalists and academics who debated about the prevalence and severity of news cosumption patterns that conform our world view. I shed light on some of the overstated claims around the role of technologies in facilitating segmented news consumption. A recording of the round table can be accessed in the link below (in Catalan):

Access here to the video of the round table on echo-chambers

 

Photo credit: Museum Victoria / Unsplash and Periodistes.org

We have published a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) where we show that mobile access to news has widened news diets and that ideological self-selection explains only a small percentage of co-exposure to news. Our newly published study resorts to an unprecedented combination of data from the US during a 5 years time window. We invested 3 years of work to understand patterns of news consumption on computers, tablets, and mobile phones.

This study has been only possible thanks to the extraordinary team work with colleages Tian Yang and professors Rasmus K. Nielsen and Sandra González-Bailón from the University of Oxford and University of Pennsylvania.

We show that exposure to news through desktop computers results in people reading from a narrower set of sources over time. But when we take into account the full range of devices on which people access news, including mobiles and tables, this picture change. People consuming news in the US encounter a much wider range of news sources and their news diets is partially explained by their ideology. On average, partisanship of news audience only counts for 16% of the variation of US news media diets.

Our paper can be accessed here