Bozarth, Lia;
Quercia, Daniele;
Capra, Licia;
Šćepanović, Sanja;
(2023)
The role of the Big Geographic Sort in Online News Circulation among U.S. Reddit Users.
Scientific Reports
, 13
, Article 6711. 10.1038/s41598-023-33247-3.
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Abstract
Past research has attributed the circulation of online news to two main factors—individual characteristics (e.g., a person’s information literacy) and social media efects (e.g., algorithmmediated information difusion)—and has overlooked a third one: the critical mass created by the ofine self-segregation of Americans into like-minded geographical regions such as states (a phenomenon called ‘The Big Sort’). We hypothesized that this latter factor matters for the online spreading of news not least because online interactions, despite having the potential of being global, end up being localized: interaction probability is known to rapidly decay with distance. Upon analysis of more than 8M Reddit comments containing news links spanning four years, from January 2016 to December 2019, we found that Reddit did not work as an ‘hype machine’ for news (as opposed to what previous work reported for other platforms, circulation was not mainly caused by platform-facilitated network efects). Rather, news circulation in Reddit worked as a supply-and-demand system: news items scaled linearly with the number of users in each state (with a scaling exponent β ≈ 1, and a goodness of ft R2 ≈ 0.95). Furthermore, deviations from such a universal pattern were best explained by state-level personality and cultural factors (R2 ≈ {0.12, 0.39}), rather than socioeconomic conditions (R2 ≈ {0.15, 0.29}) or political characteristics (R2 ≈ {0.06, 0.21}). Higher-than-expected circulation of any type of news was found in states characterised by residents who tend to be less diligent in terms of their personality (low in conscientiousness) and by loose cultures understating the importance of adherence to norms (low in cultural tightness). Interestingly, the combination of those factors with low levels of education was then associated with the circulation of a particular type of news, that is, misinformation. These results suggest that online interactions are geographically bounded and, as such, news circulation cannot be studied purely as an Internet phenomenon but should be grounded into a user’s ofine cultural environment, which has become increasingly segregated over the decades, and is admittedly hard to change.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | The role of the Big Geographic Sort in Online News Circulation among U.S. Reddit Users |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1038/s41598-023-33247-3 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-33247-3 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © Te Author(s) 2023. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Computer Science |
| URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10168173 |
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