See another side of news, politics, and culture.
The Level
The Level restores balance to the news. Every story has two sides to it. Toggle back and forth, then form your own opinion.
Sharing without clicking on news in social media
Social media have enabled laypersons to disseminate, at scale, links to news and public affairs information. Many individuals share such links without first reading the linked information. Here we analysed over 35 million public Facebook posts with uniform resource locators shared between 2017 and 2020, and discovered that such ‘shares without clicks’ (SwoCs) constitute around 75% of forwarded links. Extreme and user-aligned political content received more SwoCs, with partisans engaging in it more than politically neutral users. In addition, analyses with 2,969 false uniform resource locators revealed higher shares and, hence, SwoCs by conservatives (76.94%) than liberals (14.25%), probably because, in our dataset, the vast majority (76–82%) of them originated from conservative news domains. Findings suggest that the virality of political content on social media (including misinformation) is driven by superficial processing of headlines and blurbs rather than systematic processing of core content, which has design implications for promoting deliberate discourse in the online public sphere.
Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook
Shifts in U.S. Social Media Use, 2020–2024: Decline, Fragmentation, and Enduring Polarization
Using nationally representative data from the 2020 and 2024 American National Election Studies (ANES), this paper describes how U.S. social media use has shifted across platforms, demographics, and politics. Overall platform reach declined, driven by growth in the share of Americans — especially the youngest and oldest cohorts — who report using no social media. Visiting and posting activity on Twitter/X and Facebook have fallen by nearly 50% since 2020, with the decline on Twitter/X driven primarily by reduced participation among Democratic users. While Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter/X lost ground, TikTok and Reddit grew modestly, consistent with a more fragmented digital public sphere. Platform audiences aged and became slightly more educated and racially diverse. Politically, most platforms shifted toward Republican users while remaining, on balance, Democratic-leaning. Twitter/X experienced the largest change: among posters, the partisan balance swung over 70 percentage points from Democrats to Republicans. Across platforms, political posting remains closely tied to affective polarization, as the most partisan respondents are also the most active. As casual users disengage while polarized partisans remain vocal, online discourse becomes narrower and more ideologically extreme.
Does news help us become knowledgeable or think we are knowledgeable? Examining a linkage of traditional and social media use with political knowledge
This study examines traditional and social media news use in relation to political knowledge from the perspective of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Data from a two-wave panel survey show that social me...
The Interplay of Knowledge Overestimation, Social Media Use, and Populist Ideas: Cross-Sectional and Experimental Evidence From Germany and Taiwan - Niels G. Mede, Adrian Rauchfleisch, Julia Metag, Mike S. Schäfer, 2024
Social media expose users to an abundance of information about various issues. But they also make it difficult for users to assess the quality of this informati...
Bluesky COO Rose Wang On Building a Better Social Network
The limits of social media as a source of political information during routine and crisis times across 17 countries
Recent studies on political knowledge suggest people learn little about political events and societal issues from social media. Potentially, social media are a more effective source of information ...
Today, Bridgy Fed begins expanding beyond microblogging, starting with long-form. If your Atmosphere (Bluesky, Blacksky, Eurosky, Northsky, etc.) account is bridged, all of your @standard.site publications and documents will bridge over to the Fediverse and the web 📜↔️📃 1/4 🧵
Long-Form Comes To Bridgy Fed
blog.anew.socialIs social media truly making us more politically polarized, or does it simply over-represent our most extreme opinions? In our new preprint, @small-schulz.bsky.social and I present *punishing evidence* that social media systematically overrepresents users’ most extreme political opinions. 1/n
Social media discourse is driven by false #polarization We find that: 1) ideologues post opinions more than moderates 2) extreme attitudes are posted more than moderate one 3) This replicates in 40 countries 4) Opinions that users post are more hostile than the beliefs they keep to themselves
rhosf.leaflet.pub/3mqsznoy55k2s/ Such an interesting post by @tessa.germnetwork.com! I feel like I have a different perspective on the social network vs. social media terms having lived through that era, but I definitely think about this distinction a lot too!
People, Not Posts
rhosf.leaflet.pubPart II is live now. What comes after social media?
People, Not Posts: Part II - What Comes After Social Media?
rhosf.leaflet.pubDo you like your social media less toxic? Yeah, we do too. @eurosky.social and Germany's Federal Agency for Breakthrough Innovation (SPRIND) just signed an agreement to collaborate on precisely that: eurosky.tech/news/eurosky-sprind-bridgeu/
Eurosky is collaborating with SPRIND to test a non-toxic algorithm for the first time - Eurosky
eurosky.tech
