Non-news Websites Expose People to More Political Content Than News Websites: Evidence from Browsing Data in Three Countries

Wojcieszak, Magdalena, Ericka Menchen-Trevino, Bernhard Clemm von Hohenberg, Sjifra E. de Leeuw, João Gonçalves, Samuel Davidson, and Alexandre Gonçalves. 2022. “Non-news Websites Expose People to More Political Content Than News Websites: Evidence from Browsing Data in Three Countries.” OSF Preprints. October 13. doi:10.31219/osf.io/8et9g

Abstract: Most scholars focus on the prevalence and democratic effects of (partisan) news exposure. This focus misses large parts of online activities of a majority of politically disinterested citizens. Although political content also appears outside of news outlets and may profoundly shape public opinion, its prevalence and effects are under-studied at scale. This project combines three-wave panel survey data from three countries (total N = 6,892) with online behavioral data from the same participants (119.7M visits). We create a multi-lingual classifier to identify political content both in news and outside (e.g. in shopping or entertainment sites). We find that news consumption is infrequent: just 3.4% of participants’ online browsing comprised visits to news sites. Only between 14% (NL) and 36% (US) of these visits were to hard news. The overwhelming majority of participants' visits were to non-news sites. Although only 1.6% of those visits related to politics, in absolute terms, citizens encounter politics more frequently outside of news than within news. Out of every 10 visits to political content, 3 come from news and 7 from non-news sites. Furthermore, non-news exposure to political content had the same – and in some cases stronger - associations with key democratic attitudes and behaviors as news exposure. These findings offer a comprehensive analysis of the online political (not solely news) ecosystem and demonstrate the importance of assessing the prevalence and effects of political content in non-news sources.