The Impact of Individualised Proattitudinal and Counterattitudinal Online Recommendations on Selective Exposure in Political Messages

One of the central questions in the ongoing discussion about the democratic potential of the Internet is whether the online sphere fosters selective exposure to political messages. The increased popularity of online filtering and recommender systems has created a heated debate about its potential reinforcing effects on the increased self-selection of political messages online, hence increasingly fostering group polarization. While there is a lot of evidence for self selection of media, at the same time, there is a belief that social media patforms provide new opportunities for online users to select news stories from diverse sources and opinions, hence potentially increasing the diversification of citizens’ news consumption pallet fostering political tolerance. Furthermore, online recommender systems may also allow for the suggestions to read or watch counter-attitudinal information, as the most popular or highly rated news items or those recommended by weak ties might not always match the individuals’ preferences. The question then is whether such counter-attitudinal recommendations counterbalance the natural tendency to seek likeminded information? Thus the main object of this study is to examine the effect of online personalized pro-attitudinal and counter-attitudinal recommendations on users’ choice of online information. The questions are whether pro-attitudinal recommendations reinforce selective exposure and counter-attitudinal recommendations decrease selective exposure? How do the effects differ between people who have strong and weak political predispositions? How do recommendations change further information seeking decisions? In order to answer these questions we designed a two-step online experiment in order to assess the effects of personalized recommendations on selective exposure and information selection among 497 undergraduate students at a main English speaking university in Canada.