# Selective Exposure shapes the Facebook News Diet

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.00699 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00699/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 2 Mar 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Iffy-Or-Not: Extending the Web to Support the Critical Evaluation of Fallacious Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14412/) (2025)
- [When or What? Understanding Consumer Engagement on Digital Platforms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10474/) (2025)
- [Measuring Narrative Polarization in Online Discourse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.07398/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.