The third presenter in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Frederik Weber Henriksen, whose focus is on cross-cutting exposure to news content in the Danish context. This research is being done in the context of increasing polarisation, even in Denmark, which implies that hearing voices from opposite sides matters for ensuring that people form better-informed worldviews.
When encountering social media posts that one disagrees with, there are various opportunities for engagement; broader media use is likely to result in greater cross-cutting exposure, but such cross-cutting exposure itself does not necessarily lead to cross-cutting engagement as well. Further, it is also important to recognise that audiences do not necessarily only focus on mainstream media, but may also draw on alternative news sources.
Repertoire and interest analysis can explain how much disagreement people encounter, but not what they do with it; using a survey of some 1,800 Danish respondents, this project found that more than 40% of respondents sought views and issue coverage beyond the traditional news media, and this is especially prominent for respondents who had strongly anti-elitist views or thought that the mainstream media and politics do not address the issues that are relevant to ordinary people. It can be assumed that such people might also be more inclined to share and comment on cross-cutting worldviews.
Several hypotheses about cross-cutting exposure behaviours arise from these initial observations, and these were tested using further survey work. Media breadth, platform breadth, political interest, alternative news seeking, and anti-establishment views each promoted greater exposure; alternative news seeking and anti-establishment views also result in greater active news sharing and responding; these and political interest also boost political following behaviours.
This is only a starting point for the analysis, however, since the survey analysis draws on a relatively small number of respondents for each section of the participant base.
