Similarity (geometry)

Advertising

Psychology

Programming language

Social psychology

The Internet

Artificial intelligence

Ideology

Media consumption

Consumption (sociology)

News media

Business

Moderation

Politics

Image (mathematics)

Political science

Social media

Computer science

World Wide Web

Sociology

Construct (python library)

Social science

Internet privacy

Mainstream

American Journal of Political Science

Does the internet facilitate selective exposure to politically congenial content? To answer this question, I introduce and validate large‐ N behavioral data on Americans' online media consumption in both 2015 and 2016. I then construct a simple measure of media diet slant and use machine classification to identify individual articles related to news about politics. I find that most people across the political spectrum have relatively moderate media diets, about a quarter of which consist of mainstream news websites and portals. Quantifying the similarity of Democrats' and Republicans' media diets, I find nearly 65% overlap in the two groups' distributions in 2015 and roughly 50% in 2016. An exception to this picture is a small group of partisans who drive a disproportionate amount of traffic to ideologically slanted websites. If online “echo chambers” exist, they are a reality for relatively few people who may nonetheless exert disproportionate influence and visibility.

(Almost) Everything in Moderation: New Evidence on Americans' Online Media Diets