# Selective Exposure shapes the Facebook News Diet

## TL;DR

This study analyzes how users on Facebook tend to focus on a limited set of news pages and topics, revealing patterns of selective exposure that may contribute to echo chambers and influence online information consumption.

## Contribution

The paper provides a large-scale quantitative analysis of user behavior on Facebook, introducing a taxonomy to distinguish between selective exposure and genuine interest.

## Key findings

- Users tend to follow a very limited number of news pages.
- Users interact with almost all topics on their favored pages.
- Selective exposure may drive the formation of echo chambers.

## Abstract

The social brain hypothesis fixes to 150 the number of social relationships we are able to maintain. Similar cognitive constraints emerge in several aspects of our daily life, from our mobility up to the way we communicate, and might even affect the way we consume information online. Indeed, despite the unprecedented amount of information we can access online, our attention span still remains limited. Furthermore, recent studies showed the tendency of users to ignore dissenting information but to interact with information adhering to their point of view. In this paper, we quantitatively analyze users' attention economy in news consumption on social media by analyzing 14M users interacting with 583 news outlets (pages) on Facebook over a time span of 6 years. In particular, we explore how users distribute their activity across news pages and topics. We find that, independently of their activity, users show the tendency to follow a very limited number of pages. On the other hand, users tend to interact with almost all the topics presented by their favored pages. Finally, we introduce a taxonomy accounting for users behavior to distinguish between patterns of selective exposure and interest. Our findings suggest that segregation of users in echo chambers might be an emerging effect of users' activity on social media and that selective exposure -- i.e. the tendency of users to consume information interest coherent with their preferences -- could be a major driver in their consumption patterns.