Seminario Frictions in News Consumption: Evidence from Social Media

Abstract

We study whether news customization decisions on social media reflect the deliberate expression of users' preferences or whether they are shaped by salience-driven behavioral frictions and platform cues. Guided by a model in which choices occur only when a decision episode is triggered and primarily from a salient consideration set, we run a five-week field experiment with more than 3,000 U.S. Facebook users that varies (i) whether participants are prompted to re-optimize the news pages they follow through a platform-integrated interface and (ii) whether they receive personalized information about outlet slant and reliability. Consistent with the salience model and contrary to traditional models of news consumption we find that a re-optimization prompt induces large portfolio changes even without new information, while reliability information affects behavior only if paired with the re-optimization interface. These interventions move users’ portfolios closer to their stated preferences, mitigating internalities, and they reduce portfolio slant and increase reliability, shifting two key inputs into concerns about negative externalities for democracy. The induced portfolio changes persist for more than a month and translate into measurable changes in online news consumption.