Frictions in News Consumption: Evidence from Social Media

We study the drivers of like-minded and low-reliability news-following on social media, as well as the effectiveness of interventions targeting them. In a five-week field experiment with more than 3,000 U.S. Facebook users, we document the importance of salience-based behavioral frictions in shaping users' news portfolios on the platform. Guided by a theoretical framework, the experiment varies: (i) whether participants are prompted to re-optimize the portfolio of news pages they follow on Facebook through a platform-integrated interface that increases the salience of a balanced set of news outlets, and (ii) whether they receive personalized information about outlet slant and reliability. We find that, consistent with our salience model and in contrast to canonical models of news demand, the re-optimization interface with a salient menu of news pages induces large portfolio changes even without the provision of information; conversely, the provision of information has no effect unless paired with the re-optimization interface. Our interventions produce two main implications for users' news portfolios. First, they move users’ portfolios closer to their stated preferences, mitigating internalities. Second, they reduce the slant and increase the reliability of users' portfolios, thus potentially mitigating negative externalities for democracy. The induced portfolio changes persist for more than a month, translate into measurable changes in online news consumption, and are unlikely to be driven by experimentation motives or experimenter demand effects.