Automated Incidental Exposure and Active News Curation

The next speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Richard Fletcher, who highlights the shift in news users’ main source of news – away from conventional sources and towards online, digital, app-based, and social media channels. This has been linked by some with a rise in echo chambers and filter bubbles, but the incidental news exposure that such platforms also engender means that it has been very difficult to find any real evidence for filter bubbles beyond isolated extreme cases.

One important aspect in all of this is automated incidental news exposure: do incidentally exposed news users actively curate their news feeds, or is that task performed for them by platform affordances? The present study builds on the Reuters Institute Digital News Report data and focusses on news users who self-declared as incidentally exposed users; it asked such users whether they actively followed news sources or changed their settings to see more news (positive news curation), or did the opposite to disconnect from the news (negative news curation).

Across a selection of countries, between 45% and 65% of those who are incidentally exposed also actively curate their feeds to shape the news they see. Incidentally exposed users who often see news they don’t like will engage in negative curation; users who see news they do like are likely to engage in positive curation. This differs somewhat across countries. Incidental exposure is not simply a passive process, therefore, but also leads to active curation. Such active curation may counteract the automated serendipity built into platforms, and platform changes that afford more control over incidental exposure may in the end reduce the levels of incidental exposure for such users.