Phones Actually Pop Skewed 'News Bubbles'

Contrary to concern about partisan “news bubbles” and “echo chambers,” mobile devices expose Americans to a greater variety of news than desktop computers, new research shows.

In recent years, we’ve heard a lot about “news bubbles” and “echo chambers,” the idea that to validate their own worldviews, liberals read liberal news and conservatives read conservative news. The proliferation of partisan online news sites, the thinking goes, only makes it worse.

Numerous studies have supported these ideas. However, they all have one thing in common: They don’t take into account the news people read on their mobile devices.

In the new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers analyzed the news consumption of tens of thousands of Americans over a five-year period on their desktop computers, tablets, and mobile phones.

They found that mobile devices diversified the stories that people encounter and exposed them to a breadth of information sources.

In an era where mobile phones are increasingly the gateway to the internet for the majority worldwide, this insight into mobile news exposure is an encouraging sign.

“Given our observation that echo chambers are not as significant as many assume they are, our data suggest that Americans might still be willing to hear from the other side,” says lead author Tian Yang, a doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. “Also, getting information from a diverse pool of news sources might help reduce the effects of misinformation, a major concern in the current information environment.”

The study shows that exposure to news through desktop computers has resulted in people reading from a narrower set of sources over time. But when the analysis takes into account the full range of devices on which people access the internet, including mobile phones, a picture emerges in which Americans encounter a much wider range of news sources, exposure that is largely not dictated by partisan beliefs. On average, the political ideology of news audiences only counted for 16% of the variation in their exposure to news outlets.

“Our results are counterintuitive because we are taking into account a large percentage of the online population that is often excluded from the data,” says senior author Sandra González-Bailón, associate professor of communication at the Annenberg School for Communication. “Examining mobile phone usage totally changes the picture of how people encounter information online.”

The researchers theorize that the structure of mobile apps, news aggregators, and social media networks lead people to click on stories on a variety of sites that they might not otherwise visit.

While the data paint a pro-democratic picture of a broadly informed electorate, there was another, less optimistic finding: Half of Americans who are online do not read news on any of their digital devices. While we think about Americans as split between two news bubbles, in fact half of the US population is opting out of online news altogether.

“What this tells us is that the left-right ideological divide may be less important than the divide between those who are informed and those who are not,” says González-Bailón.

“And this finding matters because news-avoiders are likely to be more vulnerable to misinformation and manipulation, and we have to do more to research that.”

In addition to Yang and González-Bailón, coauthors of the study include Silvia Majó-Vázquez and Rasmus K. Nielsen, both of the University of Oxford. The research, completed while González-Bailón was on sabbatical leave at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, was funded by the National Science Foundation.