Demographic Divides in Political Content Exposure on Facebook

TL;DR

This study analyzes a decade-long Facebook dataset to reveal persistent demographic disparities in political content exposure and the impact of platform changes on information environments.

Contribution

It provides the first longitudinal, platform-independent analysis of political content exposure across demographics on Facebook.

Findings

Political content makes up 18% of users' information diet.

Significant disparities in political content volume and ideology across age, gender, and race.

Platform interventions like Facebook's 2018 update increased political content exposure.

Abstract

Despite Facebook's central role in American civic life, a clear, evidence-based understanding of users' long-term information environments has remained elusive, hindering assessments of the platform's societal impact. This study addresses that gap by analyzing a unique decade-long dataset, constructed by collecting the full list of public pages and groups followed by over 1,100 American users. This approach allows us to examine the potential information exposure of these users by analyzing hundreds of millions of posts from 2012 to 2023. We find that political content constitutes a modest 18% of a user's potential information diet, which is predominantly composed of lifestyle and entertainment topics. This aggregate view, however, masks a deeply stratified reality: we uncover significant and persistent disparities in the volume and ideological leaning of political content across age, gender, and racial lines. Furthermore, we quantify the porous boundaries between content categories, showing how political discourse frequently permeates non-political spaces. Leveraging the dataset's longitudinal nature, we also assess the impact of major platform interventions. We find that Meta's 2018 "Meaningful Social Interactions" update dramatically increased the share of political content by contracting the visibility of non-political posts. By providing a granular, decade-long map of potential information exposure, our study offers one of the first representative and longitudinal picture drawn from platform-independent data. Our findings underscore the critical need for researchers to measure exposure, not merely engagement, and to account for the significant volume of political content that circulates in non-political spaces.