Friends that Matter: How Social Distance Aects Selection and Evaluation of Content in Social Media

Solomon Messing Sean J. Westwood

March 20, 2013

Abstract As Americans shift from following a limited set news outlets to casually browsing social media, they empower their friends and acquaintances to regulate their information environment. This means that interpersonal relationships and social cues, in the form of endorsements by individual contacts or groups, aect the content that individuals select and how they process it. Though every relationship is unique and multifacted, each can be characterized along a single important dimensionsocial distance, comprised of the related phenomena of frequent contact, tie strength, social similarity and social group membership. We document the effects of social distance on selectivity and content evaluation in two experimental studies. The rst study, conducted in an experimentally controlled Facebook application, operationalizes social distance as frequent contact and measures its eect on news story selection. Our second experiment shows how ethnic and socio-economic group membership aects consumers decisions to read content, and demonstrates how consumers dierentially process the same content depending on their social distance to the recommender, which we show aects subsequently measured political preferences on related issues. Our results have implications for our understanding of selective exposure, consumption, and other media eects in social media.

Department of Communication, Stanford University. Equal contributions. Thanks to Shanto Iyengar, Kimberly Gross, Kyle Dropp, Cli Nass, Eytan Bakshy, Rebecca Weiss, Thomas Leeper, Nathaniel Swigger, Lilach Nir, Danny Hayes, Patricia Joseph, and other panel participants at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the Midwestern Political Science Association in Chicago, Illinois 2012. This research was generously supported by a Google Research Award and Stanford University.

Social media change the nature of getting the newswhereas traditional news outlets deliver news and information curated by an editorial board in a centralized location, social media display news and other content shared by the consumers social network contacts. Hence, the ways that consumers nd, select, and process content are inuenced by the relationship between the consumer and each individual in her social network of contacts who share content. Of course, each relationship is unique and multifaceted, but each can also be characterized along a single important dimensionsocial distance. Social distance includes two main components from the social science literature: (1) the frequency of communication and the related sociological concept of tie strength (Allport 1954; Zajonc 1968; Granovetter 1973; Alba and Kadushin 1976), and (2) social similarity: common ethnic, racial and socioeconomic group membership (Park 1924; Bogardus 1925; Tajfel and Turner 1979; Turner 1982; Homans 1951; Karakayali 2009), unconcious evaluations of physical (and possibly genetic) similiarity (Bailenson et al. 2008), percieved attitude similarity (Park and Schaller 2005), and even coincidental shared history and prior activities (Brock 1965; Burger et al. 2004). If social distance aects how consumer nd, select, and process content, the shift from loyally frequenting traditional media outlets to browsing social media has tremendous consequences for political communication. We show that social proximitysocial distance between the consumer and the recommender aects how consumers decide to allocate attention and consume content. This process privileges information shared by socially close friends at the expense of socially distant (often heterogeneous) contacts. This changes the way we process political information. We show that social proximity shapes these outcomes when operationalized both in terms of communication frequency (closely related to tie strength Allport 1954; Zajonc 1968; Granovetter 1973; Alba and Kadushin 1976), and when operationalized as common ethnic, racial and socioeconomic group membership (Park 1924; Bogardus 1925; Tajfel and Turner 1979; Turner 1982; Homans 1951; Karakayali 2009). We also establish a theoretical expectation that un-

der certain conditions the tendency to select content from socially proximate recommenders will be magnied over time by feedback loops created by the algorithms that integrate past selection preferences to determine which content to display (the related phenomena of lter bubbles was suggested in Pariser 2011). We document the eects of social distance on selectivity and content evaluation in two experimental studies. The rst study, conducted in an experimentally controlled exact copy of the Facebook interface, measures of the eect of social proximity on news story selection. This design documents how social networks and peer endorsements aect the choices made when deciding which news stories to read in social media. We then present the results of a second web-experiment on a national sample designed to document the causal eect of racial and economic attributes of recommenders (friends) on our decisions to read content, and document how social distance between the recommender and the consumer shapes evaluation of the same content and aects subsequently measured political preferences on related issues.

Traditional Media Models versus Social Media Models

Consumers are increasingly shifting from a mode where habitual viewership and readership of a traditional source is replaced with happenstance encounters with stories found in social media, with implications for the kind of news we ultimately consume. From 2000 to 2012, local and national news audiences shrank by more than 10 percentage points, while the percentage of American adults who regularly get news from Internet sources has grown from nine percent to 36 percent (Pew 2012).2 By 2011, 47 percent of Americans reported that they get at least some local news and information on their cellphone or tablet computer. By 2012, the percentage of Americans who report that they learned something about the 2012
During the same time period, the audience for cable news saw more limited growth, with 34 percent of Americans in 2000 and 41 percent of Americans in 2012.
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campaign on Facebook was 42 percent, according to the same report (Pew 2012).3 More than half of Americans now use social media on a regular basis (Facebook 2011) and American Internet users spent more time on Facebook than any other single Internet destination in 2011 by nearly two orders of magnitude according to Nielsen, with an average time per month of 7-8 hours per person (Nielsen 2011). As usage patterns shift to a mode where the vast majority of viewers visit any given site only once or twice per month (Pew 2012), the means by which the viewer nds a given story becomes critically important. In such an environment, what drives attention to a story is not a newsroom editor deciding the story that leads, nor a homepage spot with a large font and a big photo, but prominence of the story on social media. Social media users provide links to these stories, referring their contacts to the actual news content on the originating website. Figure 1 presents a heatmap showing representing the top sources of referrals (rows) to each of the top traditional news websites (columns); the darker each cell, the higher each referral source ranks in importance for that site (data from Neilsens Netview database, see Pew 2011).4 As the gure shows, Facebook was among the top sources of referral trac to each of the top 21 news websites in the Neilsen data; Twitter was a signicant source as well (Pew 2011). Given the important relationship between the mix of information to which one is exposed and political attitudes (Klapper 1960; Sears and Freedman 1967), and the way people update those attitudes in response to persuasive arguments (whether or not selective consumption is possible, Leeper 2013), these patterns have signicant implications for media fragmentation and political polarization. Much of the past work on the political implications of new media focuses on the politically polarizing eects of the political blogoshpere (Adamic and Glance 2005; Baum
We include those reporting that they LEARN SOMETHING about the PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN or the CANDIDATES regularly (12%), sometimes (20%), or hardly ever (10%). 4 Some of the top referrers to particular sources were not in the top 25 and so do not appear in the plotfor example, AOL.com is the largest referral source to AOLNews but doesnt even register for other news sources so we exclude it.
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Figure 1: Referral Trac to Traditional Online News Sources (Neilsen)

google.com news.google.com facebook.com bing.com search.yahoo.com drudgereport.com search.aol.com hotair.com yahoo.com twitter.com

Referral Source

reddit.com realclearpolitics.com traffic.outbrain.com huffingtonpost.com stumbleupon.com swagbucks.com news.yahoo.com news.search.yahoo.com aolnews.com my.msn.com my.yahoo.com fark.com ask.com ABCNews AOLNews CBSNews CNN.com ChicagoTribune DailyMail Examiner.com FoxNews.com HuffingtonPost LATimes MSNBC.com NYDailyNews NYTimes SFGate.com USAToday WasingtonPost

News Website

and Groeling 2008; Sobieraj and Berry 2011) and the potential for blogs to drive civic involvement (Kerbel and Bloom 2005; Perlmutter 2008), while other work has examined the consequences of increased political selective exposure in the context of visiting traditional media websites and news aggregators (Iyengar and Hahn 2009; Messing and Westwood 2012). Yet loyal consumption of these media remains conned to a relatively small proportion of the

public.5 Other work has discussed the potential for social media to recreate the inadvertent audience (Pasek, More, and Romer 2009) or drive voter behavior through social inuence processes (Bond et al. 2012). But no study of which we are aware has studied how the features of this new mode of communication aect how we select and process news.

How Social Media Dier and Why It Matters

From the viewers perspective,6 the most important distinction between traditional news sources and social media websites like Facebook is that the latter serve to aggregate a much more diverse array of content in a single location. Encountering news in this context represents a fundamental departure from the way in which news consumers have typically engaged content: they no longer rst decide on a news source. Instead, viewers of social media select the story itselfand we argue here that this choice must be informed by evaluations of the person who recommended this content in the rst place. The fact that news source is often unclear in the context of social media motivates the need to study what drives the decision to select from a series of items that appear in social media (e.g., those present in ones Twitter Feed or Facebook News Feed). We know that when choosing a media item from a set of headlines, consumers generally seek to maximize utility by employing cue-based heuristic processing (Kahneman 2003; Tversky and Kahneman 1974) rather than pursuing a cognitively-taxing optimization strategy, especially when considering criteria on more than one dimension (e.g., professional relevance and the ability to hold a conversation about current events, see Messing and Westwood 2012). Heuristic processing is also likely when we lack unambiguous information about the costs and benets of each
E.g., the audience for blogs is around nine percent of Americans (and much smaller if we dene the Hungton Post as a partisan news source rather than a blog), according to (Pew 2012) 6 Throughout, we refer to people who are passively browsing social media websites as viewers to distinguish the activity of passive consumption from content creation-sharing/posting, endorsing, or writing content. Of course most people will engage in multiple activities during any given visit to a social media website.
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outcome (Conlisk 1996; Simon 1972), which is certainly the case when trying to anticipate whether we will like or benet from reading/viewing a news item. The heuristic cues that people utilize in conventional media have been identied as source (most often operationalized as the media outlets brand, rather than the storys byline/author, see Althaus and Tewksbury 2002; Iyengar and Hahn 2009; Sundar, KnoblochWesterwick, and Hastall 2007), story placement, the presence of a photograph, and other editorial cues (Graber 1988) to help them judge the relevance, credibility and importance of a news story. In social media there is no editor and the only traditional cues from current models of news consumption are story title and source (though source often appears as unobtrusive and in small font). In fact, in social media the notion of what constitutes a source becomes ambiguousfor some viewers, it might be the person who shared and/or recommended the information, the initial author of the content, or the media brand itself, (e.g., Metzger 2007). Hence, social media aords a dierent and expanded set of cues compared to those previously available, most notably social endorsement cues. There are two dominant types of social endorsement cues visible in social media today: aggregated social endorsements that summarize the number or proportion of people who read, endorse, and/or comment on a media story; and personal recommendations, which constitute endorsements of content from fellow members of that readers social network. Messing and Westwood (2012) show how the presence of aggregate social endorsements change the way that people select content: readers rely on social cues to a dramatically higher degree than source cues, at least with respect to the ideological orientation thereof. We explicate how we expect social distance to aect selection and processing of content in social media, but rst we describe the interface features that serve to emphasize social attributes of recommenders. Social media emphasize recommenders personal identity, which provides a basis for our strong expectations that social distance shapes how viewers allocate attention and evaluate 5

content shared by peers. Social media purposefully encourage people to use their real names and photographs, which diminishes anonymity and makes assessments of social proximity possible (anonymity has been used to manipulate social distance, showing that it decreases reciprocity (in dictator games, Homan, McCabe, and Smith 1996), elicits less sympathy (Loewenstein and Small 2007) and altruistic behavior toward others (Charness and Gneezy 2008), and increases willingness to harm another person (Milgram 1963; Zimbardo 1969)) while photographs increase perceived likability and leads to greater hesitance to violate social norms (Bailenson et al. 2005), and lead to greater cooperation (Parise et al. 1996). Photographs in particular convey appearance and hence trigger complex cognitive processing to evaluate group membership, status, attraction and competence.7 This emphasis on social identity means that social attributes of recommenders are conveyed to viewers browsing social media and should be expected to aect selectivity and the way we process content.8

Personal Recommendations: How Social Distance Affects Exposure, Selection, and Evaluation
We now turn to an examination of how personal recommendations aect selectivity and the way we process news content within social media. Integral to all of these processes is the concept of social distance or proximity, which has often been used to measure aect between members of various socioeconomic, ethnic, racial, and/or national groups (Park
For examples of studies operationalizing these variables with photographs, see for group membership: (Blair and Jenkins 2002; Bond and Cash 1992; Dixon and Maddox 2005; Eberhardt et al. 2004; Gilliam et al. 1996; Hugenberg and Bodenhausen 2004; Klatzky, Martin, and Kane 1982; Maddox and Gray 2002; Messing, Plaut, and Jabon 2010; Ronquillo et al. 2007; Schaller, Park, and Mueller 2003; Tajfel et al. 1971; Valentino, Hutchings, and White 2002), status: (Berger and Zelditch 1985; Lerner and Moore 1974; Petty and Wegener 1999; Ridgeway 1987; Strodtbeck, James, and Hawkins 1957), attraction: (Lerner and Moore 1974; Maddux and Rogers 1980; Cunningham et al. 1995; Eagly et al. 1991), and competence: (Todorov et al. 2005; Antonakis and Dalgas 2009). 8 We recognize that it is also possible that people orient to the recommender as if she were the source of the message, especially in light of the heuristic processing involved in source orientation in human-computer interaction (Sundar and Nass 2000).
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1924; Bogardus 1925). It is conceptualized as a product of social interaction (a notion supported by the mere exposure literature on the preference for familiar attitude objects Zajonc 1968, 2001) and is closely related to the concept of tie-strength, a (probably linear) combination of the amount of time, the emotional intensity, the intimacy (mutual conding) and the reciprocal services which characterize the tie, or the relationship between two people (Granovetter 1973; see also Homans 1951; Karakayali 2009). Social distance aects how we form our networks of online contacts, the people to whom we pay most attention online, and hence whose recommendations we are likely to follow. Prior to the decision to select and consume an article as discussed above, the content to which a person is exposed is bounded by the structure of a given users social network of online contacts. Individuals tend to cultivate social ties with others that are similar to themselves, resulting in a social structure characterized by groups that are largely homogeneous along socio-demographic traits and attitudinal orientations (Lazarsfeld and Merton 1954)a pattern widely referred to as homophily. This patterns results partially from the lack of diverse individuals likely to be accessible to an individual (structural homophily), and partially from the tendency to actively seek out and foster ties with other similar individuals while avoiding those who dier (choice-homophily) (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Cook 2001). Of course, when individuals meet new individuals, it is often by meeting friends of existing friends (Parks 2008), who are likewise similar. It is thought that the content that these individuals share is driven, at least in part, by performance considerations. Liu (2007) found that people attempt to convey prestige, dierentiation, authenticity, and theatrical personas in their usage of social media. However, (Parks 2011) found that only a small portion of MySpace users actually engaged in taste performancesmany simply remained passive consumers of content. Despite the fact that people attempt to convey dierentiation when engaging in this behavior, it is worth speculating that those engaged in performances are likely to take into account the perceived 7

preferences of those in their network when deciding what to share. Of course, it is also worth noting that actual attitude-homophily is lower than individuals estimate and lower than accounts in the theoretical literature have previously suggested (Goel, Mason, and Watts 2010). Social distance also aects the people to whom we pay most attention online, and hence our exposure to news content. People often employ the liking-agreement heuristicthey trust others they like and assume that they agree with their decisions (Chaiken 1987). This heuristic predicts that viewers select content based on tie strength, or how close two people are to each other, and there is evidence that people utilize this heuristic when selecting and endorsing articles that friends endorse in the context of news aggregation services (Lerman 2007). In addition, the social network literature on choice homophily (McPherson, SmithLovin, and Cook 2001) implies a related heuristic: people like me like what I like. This predicts selection based on homophily, the similarity between people on an array of personal attributes, including race, income, political attitudes and/or partisan aliation, gender, age, education, and profession. The two are most certainly relatedan extensive literature across the social sciences demonstrates that people are often drawn to others perceived as similar (see Baumeister 1998, for a review).

How Feedback Loops Magnify the Eects of Social Distance

Even small selective tendencies can have a big eect on the actual content someone consumes due to feedback loops created when selectivity aects outcomes that in turn aect future selectivity or exposure, and we argue that social media contain structural features that serve as additional feedback loops. Selective exposure to attitude-consistent information (Festinger 1957) often occurs as an eort to defend ones personal position (Chaiken, Liberman, and Eagly 1989), but can also happen when media consumers are motivated to seek objective information but evaluate conrmatory information as more objective (Fischer 8

et al. 2005; Fischer, Schulz-Hardt, and Frey 2008). Of course, past work has hypothesized that feedback loops related to selectivity reinforce attitudes in all media, which in turn drive future selectivity, in what scholars call spirals of selectivity (Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and McPhee 1954; Slater 2007). For example, Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and McPhee (1954) found in a longitudinal eld study that exposure to political campaign content not only reinforced existing beliefs, but also that increased exposure to the campaign led to more selective exposure to media content consistent with their beliefs after the campaign. Furthermore, having more extreme attitudes is associated with additional selective exposure over-time (Stroud 2010), while at the same time, exposure to partisan media causes aective polarization (Levendusky 2013); and similarly a lack of attitudes and knowledge is thought to lead to less information processing in regression toward zero (Eveland, Shah, and Kwak 2003). When people can select from a range of opinions, they search out information consistent with the framing of their pre-existing attitude or the initial persuasive message on about the topic/issue in question encountered, and become more polarized and certain about their attitudes (Druckman, Fein, and Leeper 2012). Indeed, when opinion become suciently strong, individuals will completely disregard counter arguments and perceive the source as hostile (Vallone, Ross, and Lepper 1985). In addition to these selective spirals that characterize the way that an individual tends to consume media, social media contain other structural features that serve as additional feedback loops. As discussed above, the friendship networks that structure exposure to content are likely to be similar on many dimensions. But our networks are likely to grow even more similar over time due to conformity or social inuence (Newcomb 1943; Heider 1944; Lazer et al. 2010). And, we are likely to distance ourselves from those with whose opinions we dislike (Heider 1944; Festinger 1957). Thus, as our networks grow more similar and socially close over time, so too should the content recommended by those in our networks grow more homogeneous. 9

Algorithmic ltering serves as yet another source of feedback that can serve to reinforce and magnify the eects of social distance between people under certain conditions. In social media, we see what our friends share, but we only see about 25% of it and the order in which we see that content is determined by algorithms that rank content based on imputed preferences (to increase engagement Bernstein et al. 2013). These algorithms model a persons preferences based on her demographics, past choices, and/or the popularity of a item. Hence these algorithms can serve to magnify the eects of social distance: the more the viewer clicks on content posted by socially close individuals, the more frequently that content posted by these individuals will appear in the viewers news feed. Simultaneously, this increasingly homogeneous content will crowd out content posted by those who are socially distant from the viewer. In order to demonstrate exactly how algorithms that privilege content from favored social contacts can serve to magnify the eect of tie strength and homophily in particular when selecting content, we simulate the process of visiting a social networking website and selecting content posted by socially close and distant friends over time, depicted in Figure 2.9 The simulation is designed to establish a theoretical expectation establishing the magnitude and conditions under which we might expect ranking algorithms to privilege content from friends who are socially close on some dimension. We model this as a complex stochastic process (full simulation details and code available in the appendix). The simulation suggests that while de-facto network homophily should be the largest factor driving exposure to content in social media, algorithmic feedback loops can be introduced if people prefer and consume content recommended by homophiles friends. However,
This simulation was created based on a simplied public description of the key components of social media ranking algorithms, commonly referred to as EdgeRank and dened as e ue we , where ue is the anity score between the viewer and the content creator, wc is the weight for any given activity (e.g., posting, liking, commenting, re-sharing), and de is the decay constant based on how long ago the activity occurred, which we set to 1 here, see also http://edgerank.net/. The simulation represents a theoretical expectation, not an empirical nding.
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Figure 2: A Model of Feedback in Social Media Content Shared Exposure Consumption

Algorithm

Selectivity

Probability of Exposure to Friendj

Algorithm Updates

Figure 3: Results of 500 Simulations, over Time (T [1, ..., 365])

Proportion of Items Selected from Socially Close/Similar Friends
No Selectivity, No Algorithm No Selectivity, Algorithm (.15) Selectivity (.05), No Algorithm Selectivity (.05), Algorithm (.15)

0.7

0.6

100

200

300

100

200

300

100

200

300

100

200

300

Time (days)
Low Network Similarity/Proximity (.55) Moderate Network Similarity/Proximity (.60) High Network Similarity/Proximity (.65)

in the absence of clearly biased selective consumption, these algorithms do introduce feedback, which motivates the study of selective consumption in the following research presented below. The assumptions this simulation relies on may dier from the real world in important ways that are worth mentioning. Most importantly, we do not model selective spirals in which selective consumption polarizes opinion and leads to greater selective consumption. Also, we do not model variation in the popularity of content (e.g., the number of endorsements an item receivesFacebook likes or Twitter favorites), which should increase the likelihood that algorithms will insert such content into a users news feed, and the likelihood that the user will select that content (see Messing and Westwood 2012), which we would ex-

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pect to diminish tendencies privileging socially close friends. Furthermore, news feed ranking algorithms are thought to include a decay factor for peer-interactions such that older interactions are not weighted as heavily (Facebook 2010; Kincaid 2010), which might also serve to diminish the impact of socially proximity over time. Finally, Facebook and other companies might very well implement other factors in their models designed to increase the diversity of content people see, which would certainly diminish the magnitude of any feedback compared to our simulation.

Social Distance and Information Processing

Even after a social media viewer selects content, social proximity continues to aect consumers, shaping the way they process information. Recommenders social attributes activate stereotypes and aective associations with the group (Devine 1989) in the mind of the viewer, aecting how they process content. Such attitudes can be primed by implicit cues, subtle references to phenomena, including images as Mendelberg (2001) documented by showing that pairing a picture of a Black Willie Horton with the issue of crime in the presidential campaign of 1988 primed racial resentment in candidate evaluations and policy opinions. Others have shown that racial animus can be triggered by exposure to a wide variety of cues, including relatively innocuous visual references to Blacks, which are thought to boost the accessibility of racial schemas in memory, aecting vote choice (Kinder and Sears 1981; Valentino, Hutchings, and White 2002).10 On the other hand, counter-stereotypical
In each case, the implicit-cue priming hypothesis has been tested by experimentally manipulating the visual cue and examining its interaction with the respondents measure of racial resentment, which consists of a battery of questions about attitudes toward progressive race policies. Sniderman and Tetlock (1986) point out a range of problems with this conception: (1) it tends to discount traditional racism as a spent force when it is most certainly not, (2) it labels people who oppose progressive race policies as symbolic racists, (3) it is not clear about the relationship between anti-black aect and traditional values, (3) the boundary conditions for when to conclude that racial motives determine a policy preference is not clear. Nonetheless, it predicts a wide range relevant behavior including vote choice for black candidates (Kinder and Sears 1981; Iyengar, Banaji, and Hahn 2009) and pro-black policies (Feldman and Huddy 2005), independent of other explanatory variables. We rely on this measure in this study.
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exemplars can serve to do the exact opposite, lowering the impact of racial attitudes on behaviorPlant et al. (2009) found evidence that exposure to counter-stereotypical Black exemplars reduce implicit racial bias. Social proximity to the recommender also aects whether readers are ultimately persuaded. First, social proximity to the source serves as a social cue that strengthens persuasion by increasing personal relevance (Petty and Cacioppo 1979; Brinol and Petty 2009) when people are not suciently motivated or able to think deeply about the message (see the dual-processing literature, e.g., Chaiken 1980; Petty and Cacioppo 1986; Chaiken 1987). Second, social proximity increases the amount of thinking about high quality arguments conveyed in a message, if thinking is not otherwise constrained (Petty and Cacioppo 1979; Brinol and Petty 2009). This is especially true for common in-group membership (Mackie, Worth, and Asuncion 1990), and more likely to occur when the message topic is group-related (Van Knippenberg and Wilke 1992; Mackie, Gastardo-Conaco, and Skelly 1992) and when a prototypical or representative group member delivers the message (Van Knippenberg, Lossie, and Wilke 1994). Likewise, the amount of consideration will increase when the argument is presented by multiple sources (i.e., traditional media source and social media recommender Harkins and Petty 1987).

Study 1: Selectivity in Social Media

Our rst study demonstrates the impact of social distance when selecting social media news content. Here we operationalize social distance using behavioral measuresparticipants actual interactions with their friends on Facebook (tie strength). We created a web application that serves as an experimentally controlled copy of the Facebook news feed. Participants saw content from their actual Facebook news feed (made possible by utilizing Facebooks API), along with randomly assigned current news stories that we inserted in random order.

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Each story appeared to have been shared by a friend from each participants actual social network. We randomly assigned socially close and socially distant friends to recommend each of these articles, eectively manipulating the social distance of the recommender. We attained a measure of social distance between the participant and each of the participants friends at the start of the study based on the number of mutual interactions on Facebook.

Design and Methods

Participants were recruited from various courses at a West Coast research university. They were asked to use our proprietary Facebook application for a study on social media. After granting permission, participants waited for a few seconds while we collected their friend list and previous six months worth of wall posts, newsfeed items, comments, and photo tags. The application them summed the total interactions between the participant and the participants friends to yield a social proximity measure. Two highly connected friends and two less well-connected friends were then randomly drawn, and assigned to recommend news stories that would appear in the participants newsfeed. Participants were then shown their current news feed, with the addition of eight news stories embedded at randomly selected points. External links were disabled to prevent distraction. The eight stories were randomly assigned a highly connected friend recommender (2 stories), a less well-connected friend recommender (2 stories), and to a state in which either the New York Times or Fox News logo was displayed instead of an actual friend (4 stories). News stories were sourced from CNN, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal on a variety of topics including politics, international news, sports, and entertainment. Figure 4 presents a screenshot showing the screen layout for the experimental application, which retains the look and feel of the Facebook news feed. All references to the storys source from within the article were removed from the articles so as not to confound the source manipulation. Participants could click on a story to read the full story in an iframe, a window that 14

opened within the current web page. A click on a story constitutes our dependent measure, though it is important to note that participants could read the storys summary which was embedded in the news feed. After the experiment, we issued a survey to respondents asking about relevant socio-demographics and inquiring about the people who ostensibly recommended each story in their news feed. Participants were fully debriefed at the conclusion of the survey. Figure 4: Racial Homophily in Selection of News Items in Facebook Application

A total of 183 students participated in the study, 34 of whom were removed from the analysis because they guessed the manipulation.11 Participants comprised a relatively diverse set of individuals, with 75 identifying as White, 16 as Black, 9 as Hispanic, 27 as Asian, 21 identied as being of another racial/ethnic group, and 1 did not list any such identication. Females were over-represented, with 90 Females to 59 males. The sample skewed politically
To alert us as to when deception was detected, we asked participants Sometimes it is surprising what our friends like. How surprised were you at the news stories your friends recommended? Those responding No way! My friends would have never recommended those stories were removed from the analysis.
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Figure 5: Selection by Tie Strength and News Outlet

Selection by Tie Strength

Strong Tie

Source
Weak Tie

0.075

0.100

0.125

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0.175

Mean Selection Rate, SE

left, with 64 identifying as Democrats, 19 as Republicans, 24 as Independents or Other, and 42 not providing any political aliation.

Results
Social proximity between the viewer and the person who recommended the article aects the selection decision. Figure 5 shows that recommendations from contacts with whom interaction is relatively frequent (strong ties) were more likely to prompt participants to select an article than recommendations from contacts with whom interaction was rare (weak ties).12 A paired, two-sided t-test comparing each respondents probability of selecting content recommended by strong versus weak ties reveals that this dierence is signicant (t(148) = 2.287, p = 0.024).13 We also found some tendencies for people to select content recommended by others with a similar ethnic background. Of course, homophily should be expected to govern the absolute number of articles recommended from friends of various ethnic backgrounds that each participant encountered, so we compare the selection ratethe number of articles selected divided by the number of articles that each ethnic group recommended. With some exAll error bars are standard errors. We take the proportion of articles selected per respondent per high and low recommenders to avoid exaggerating our condence in these estimates by articially inating N . 13 All tests employed here are two-sided.
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ceptions, each group selected an approximately similar ratio of articles to read. Whites selected at a marginally higher rate articles recommended by Black contacts ( = .15) than Asian contacts ( = .02, t(17.86) = 1.49, p = .16). However, Blacks selected at a lower rate articles recommended by White contacts (none) compared to Black contacts ( = .10, t(15) = 2.18, p = .05), and similarly, Asians selected at a lower rate articles recommended by Black contacts (none) than Asian contacts ( = .18, t(19) = 2.53, p = .02). Of course, we did not manipulate ethnicity in Study 1 and so cannot make a causal claim about its impact on selectivitywe document the causal eect of common ethnic group membership on selectivity in Study 2 below.

Study 2: How Group Membership Aects Selectivity and Attitudes Toward Content
In this study, we experimentally manipulated recommender attributes independent of the viewers actual friend network, in order to estimate how such attributes aect selection and processing of content. This design was exible enough to allow the use of national survey sample. Our ndings suggest that a recommenders socioeconomic attributes have implications for how people select content and can shape attitudes on topically related issues (in this case, on welfare) assessed after reading the article.

Design and Methods

Participants were drawn from the Survey Sampling International (SSI) panel to participate in a web experiment and were told that they were testing a news browsing system we developed. After completing some basic demographic questions, we asked participants to browse news stories from four topics (U.S. news, health, sports, and entertainment) and

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select stories to read later. For each topic, participants could select one of three stories in the context of a minimalist social media interfaceaording superior experimental controlas depicted in Figure 6, top. One of these stories contained a recommendation from a person whose race, gender, and socioeconomic status were manipulated (as per Figure 6, below). Recommenders were unknown to participants. Figure 6: Minimalist Social Media Selection Interface

After selecting four stories, participants were asked to read a story that the system recommended for them. All participants saw the same storya welfare piece written in a tone typical of U.S. journalistic coverage, aspiring to neutrality. The system displayed a recommender as depicted in Figure 7. After reading the story, participants completed a battery of questions about their attitudes regarding the importance of welfare, their preferences regarding welfare spending, and their attitudes about the negative consequences of welfare. The stimulus images consisted of a head shot, clothing and background. Our socioe18

Figure 7: Minimalist Social Media Reading Interface

conomic status (SES) manipulation consisted of two conditions: the high SES condition featured models dressed in business attire with a background designed to convey high SES such as an oce, while the low SES condition featured models dressed in t-shirts with a background designed to convey low SES, such as a brick wall or grati mural. Our race and gender manipulations were operationalized by using head shots of dierent models who were either White or Black and male or female. We carefully matched these images on attractiveness so as not to confound the race manipulation.14 To maintain consistency, the same outts, backgrounds, and faces were used to generate the images for each of the 16 cells (high/low SES, white/black and male/female). Control images consisted of White males of high SES. We provide the stimulus images in Figure 8. Our treatment images for the selection study are labelled as Set 1, while our treatment images for the welfare attitude
We enlisted 225 Mechanical Turk workers to rate the images. The dierence in attractiveness ratings (1-7 scale) between Whites ( = 3.86, N = 113) and Blacks ( = 3.34, N = 112) was not signicant (two-tailed t-test, t = 1.33, P > .10.
14

19

study are labeled as Set 2. Figure 8: Stimuli for experimental manipulations of SES, gender and race

Participants consisted of 1162 respondents from across the country. Participants comprised a relatively diverse set of individuals, with 850 identifying as White, 130 as Black, 101 as Hispanic, 51 as Asian, while 28 identied as from an other racial/ethnic group, and two did not list any suchidentication. Females were slightly over-represented, with 622 Females to 538 males. The sample leaned slightly to the political leftthough at a ratio similar to voter registration gureswith 428 identifying as Democrats, 340 as Independents or Other, 285 as Republicans, and 85 not providing any political aliation.

20

Results
Selectivity First we turn to the question of whether the social distance operationalized in terms of racial group membership and SES of a recommender aect the choices people make when selecting content. Figure 9 (left) shows the impact of race and income homophily in the selection of content.15 For each respondent, we take the mean selection rate for each recommender, then compare the impact of each recommender race using this metric. We must of course stratify our analysis by group membership, and we include only Whites and Blacks in our analysis of racial group membership. Whites were signicantly less likely to select a story when it was recommended by poor Blacks ( = .28), compared to rich Whites ( = .33, t(918.5) = 2.40, p = .016) and poor Whites ( = .32, t(1405.0) = 1.68, p = .092). Conversely, Blacks were signicantly less likely to select a news story when rich Whites recommended it ( = .31) compared to rich Blacks ( = .42, t(126.7) = 2.13, p = .035) but not signicantly so for poor Blacks ( = .41, t(140.7) = 2.09, p = .038). Whites were also more likely to select stories that did not come recommended (Control in the gure), while the opposite was true for Blackswe suspect this reects a stronger sense of social identity among Blacks, though it could also be due to simple dierences in news consumption habits. Turning to economic homophily, we nd a similar pattern, shown in Figure 9 (right). High income participants16 were more likely to select content that came from a rich White recommender ( = .33) than a poor White ( = .26, t(236.6) = 2.11, p = .034) or poor Black ( = .26, t(262.6) = 2.04, p = .041) recommender. Among low income respondents, there is no clear pattern. We see a similar tendency among high income respondents to select the article without a recommender.
We pool over gender in this analysis as it proved inconsequential in shaping selection or information processing. We also pool our White recommenders. 16 We dene high-income here as those in the top 33 percentile in the sample.
15

21

Figure 9: The Impact of Social Distance on Selection

Ethnic Group Membership
White N = 850 Control Rich, White Poor, White
G G

Economic Strata
High Income N = 229 Control Rich, White Poor, White
G G G

Income of Recommender

Race of Recommender

Rich, Black Poor, Black

G

Rich, Black Poor, Black

G

Black N = 130 Control Rich, White Poor, White Rich, Black Poor, Black 0.30 0.35 0.40
G G G

Low Income N = 931 Control Rich, White Poor, White

G G

Rich, Black Poor, Black 0.45 0.25 0.30

G

0.35

0.40

Mean Selection Rate, SE

Mean Selection Rate, SE

Stratifying on racial resentment reveals evidence that attitudes related to social distance serve to strengthen its eects. Figure 10 shows the those with high racial resentment were less likely to select a poor Black recommender ( = .27) compared to a poor White recommender ( = .36, t(891.10) = 2.78, p = 0.006). High-resentment respondents were also more likely to select content from a rich White recommender ( = .33, t(586.441) = 2.516, p = 0.012). However, they were not signicantly more likely to select content from a rich Black recommender ( = .32, t(893.79) = 1.51, p = 0.131).

Processing We now turn to the question of how respondents process article content dierently based on the race and socio-economic status of the recommender. After reading the article at the end of the experiment, we asked respondents a standard battery of questions related to welfares social consequences and whether they support increasing or lowering current levels of funding for welfare. We compute a social consequences index by taking the mean of the four responses (after reversing relevant responses) and rescaling to 0-1 such that 0 22

Figure 10: The Impact of Racial Resentment on Selection

Racial Resentment
High Resentment N = 545 Control Rich, White Rich, Black
G G G

Race of Recommender

Poor, White Poor, Black

G

Low Resentment N = 615 Control Rich, White Rich, Black Poor, White Poor, Black 0.250 0.275 0.300
G G G

0.325

0.350

0.375

Mean Selection Rate, SE

represents most negative consequences while 1 represents most positive. We also rescale our welfare spending preference question similarly to 0-1, such that 0 represents a preference for a signicant decrease, while 1 represents a preference for a signicant increase. As shown in Figure 11, there is evidence that recommender race aects judgments about the social consequences of welfare and support for funding social welfare programs for Whites and Blacks alike. Among Whites, seeing a Black recommender with high socioeconomic statusa counterstereotypical exemplarwas more likely to elicit positive support for welfare ( = .53) than a poor White ( = .48, t(357.329) = 2.309, p = 0.022). This result is especially important as it crosses the midpoint of the index. This exemplary Black recommender was also more likely to be selected an article recommended from a poor Black recommender ( = .49) to an extent that approaches statistical signicance (t(365.728) = 1.511, p = 0.132). A similar pattern holds for preferences regarding welfare spending. Among Whites, seeing a Black recommender with high socioeconomic status resulted in a preference for greater 23

spending ( = .50) than seeing a poor White recommender ( = .43, t(359.391) = 2.579, p = 0.010). This preference for greater spending compared to a poor Black recommender was not signicant, however ( = .48, t(391.18) = 0.548, p = 0.584) Figure 11: Participants Race and Welfare Attitudes

Welfare's Social Consquences

White N = 850 Rich, White Poor, White
G G

Welfare Spending Preferences

White N = 850 Rich, White Poor, White
G G

Race of Recommender

Rich, Black Poor, Black

G

Race of Recommender

Rich, Black Poor, Black

G

Black N = 130 Rich, White Poor, White Rich, Black Poor, Black 0.45 0.50 0.55 0.60
G

Black N = 130 Rich, White Poor, White Rich, Black

G G

Poor, Black 0.70 0.4 0.5 0.6

0.65

0.7

Consquence index ( harmful, + helpful), SE

Spending Preference ( decrease, + increase), SE

Racial and socioeconomic attributes matter in selection irrespective of content, even when recommenders are strangers. Here, weve isolated the eect of these attributes independent of story topic or content, as well as tie strength (by virtue of the fact that the recommenders are strangers). Weve also established that patterns of selection among racially distinct recommenders are due to actual preferences for those races, not merely that racially similar individuals happen to be generally more connected to each other. Perhaps more importantly, and somewhat paradoxically, this suggests that recommender attributes alone can aect public opinion on racially charged issues. Specically, when exposed to a counterstereotypical exemplar, Whites were more likely to give more positive evaluations of racially charged social policies like welfare. 24

Discussion
We showed that the attributes of those who recommend content in social media aect how readers select and process content. In particular, the social distance between the consumer and the recommender, including tie strength, racial, and socio-economic similarity are key factors when a consumer decides how to allocate attention and consume the vast array of content embedded in social media. Our designs allow us to make a direct causal assertion that social proximity, operationalized as communication frequency or tie strength (Study 1) and common group membership (Study 2) drive the selection of content, independent of common interests or other sources of similarity/homophily. This study adds to growing evidence that socially proximate contacts (strong ties) drive selection and play a key role in the information diusion process (Bakshy et al. 2012). Furthermore, we demonstrated that patterns in content selection have direct implications for attitudes about American politics. In particular, the social attributes of the storys recommender interact with an individuals attitudes about policy, and aect stated policy preferenceson social welfare policies in this case. We also showed the conditions under which this tendency to select content from socially close recommenders can be magnied over time as a byproduct of algorithms that integrate past selection preferences when determining what to display to users. If social distance aects how consumer nd, select, and process content, the shift from loyally frequenting traditional media outlets to browsing social media has tremendous consequences for political communication. Agenda-setting theory posits that the media determine the issues and events that enter public consciousness, and those that do not make media coverage generally fall to the wayside (e.g., McCombs and Shaw 1972; McLeod, Becker, and Byrnes 1974; Erbring, Goldenberg, and Miller 1980; Hill 1985); priming theory goes further, suggesting that people make political decisions based on topical and/or social considerations that are salient in the mass media (Krosnick and Kinder 1990; Gilliam and Iyengar 2000; 25

Mendelberg 2008; Valentino, Hutchings, and White 2002); on the other hand, indexing theory posits that the press sometimes functions as a mere conduit for messages from ocials, especially in times of war (Bennett 1990; Cook 1994; Zaller and Chiu 1996; Entman 2003; Slantchev 2006). But when information ows between groups of people rather than from media companies directly to consumers, these eects depend on the extent to which interpersonal information ows mirror the medias agenda. If the medias agenda is distorted by interpersonal information ows (as in the days before the broadcast era of political communication, see two-step ow models Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955; Katz 1957) and selective consumption (an increasingly common nding, see Klapper 1960; Sears and Freedman 1967; Iyengar et al. 2008; Iyengar and Hahn 2009; Stroud 2010; Messing and Westwood 2012), mass media effects on social media consumers will be the exception, not the rule (Bennett and Iyengar 2008). Indeed, scholars are already nding weaker aggregate and individual-level media effects, such as agenda-setting (Shehata and Stromback 2013). Our ndings provide evidence that agendas in the context of social media should be considered highly interpersonal, resembling something more akin to the two-step ow model of political communication, rather than mass media eects or priming (see also Messing and Westwood 2012; Mutz and Young 2011). Because people are more likely to select content from socially close contacts, the likelihood of exposure to attitude-inconsistent information in social media will be lower insofar as our close friends have similar viewpoints. On the other hand, social media encourage users to maintain a vast array of online relationships comprising of both socially proximate and distant ties (Hampton et al. 2009), including work contacts with whom the potential for cross-cutting discourse that introduces counter-attitudinal information is substantially higher (Mutz and Mondak 2006). These socially distant, weak ties are responsible for propagating novel content that viewers would not otherwise encounter (Bakshy et al. 2012). 26

Nonetheless, our results open new questions related to technologys role in polarization and fragmentation beyond exclusively partisan lines (Sunstein 2007; Slater 2007; Stroud 2010), but also along an array of existing social cleavages (as alluded to in Bennett and Iyengar 2008). Our results also suggest that we should expect key media eectsagendasetting, priming, framing and indexingto occur dierently in dierent socio-economic, ethnic, and political strata. Furthermore, as the attributes of those who share the story aect how we process that story and update our policy preferences, we might see additional factionalization within socioeconomic/ethnic strata even if all strata are consuming the same content. Regardless of whether social media can recreate the inadvertent audience (Pasek, More, and Romer 2009) and overcome partisan bias (Messing and Westwood 2012), our ndings suggest the potential for the social media ecosystem to fragment along existing social cleavages. There are several limitations to this research. The sample for study 1 was comprised of college students and had disproportionate allocations of liberals and Whites. Moreover, the results in study 1 suggest a general disinterest in news stories, or perhaps a lack of interest in this study in particular, as only about half of the studys participants selected a single news story to read. Study 2 required participants to select one of a number of news stories, but this design may have encouraged satiscing. Of course, any such disinterest or decit of attention on behalf of participants during our studies compared to actual social media use should be expected to obscure the true eect sizes, meaning this design may understate the true eect size. Nonetheless, our ndings suggest that social distance is indeed a powerful force driving news consumption and serves to privilege information shared by socially close friends at the expense of heterogeneous contacts. Furthermore, our ndings add to the evidence that in the context of social media, factionalization will not only be driven by anticipated agreement, but the mix of content we encounter (Sears and Freedman 1967; Leeper 2013), both of which 27

are driven by social distance. Our ndings also suggest that the racial and socioeconomic diversity of our social networks impact our policy preferences, by virtue of the fact that the storys recommender aects both the importance we place on a story and our political attitudes related to the storys content.

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Appendix: Simulation Code

For each viewer, we generate the number of friends he or she has (nFriend negbin(r = 2, p = .01) + 50) and the proportion of those friends who are socially close (or perhaps not socially distant, propCloseFrnds logist(norm(mean = closeP rop)) ). Then for each friend, we generate a dummy variable recording whether the friend is socially close to the viewer (isFriendClose bern(propClose)), a likelihood of posting or recommending content (probPost unif (0, 1)2 ), and initialize the websites algorithmic propensity to display content to the user from this particular friend (displayFriendProb = .5). Then, we simulate 365 over-time instances of viewing the news feed (or say, visits to the website). We simulate posts from all of the viewers friends (posts pois(probPost)), and select 20 posts to appear as items in the viewers news feed (newsFeed), using the displayFriendProb value from each posts author as sample probability weights. Then, we model which posts the viewer reads by picking a number of posts to sample (nSelected binom(n = 20, p = .5)), and then sampling nSelected items from the newsFeed, using the selection eect (closeEffect = .10, documented below) as sample probability weights, resulting in pickedItems. We record the proportion of items selected from homophilous friends. We then update displayFriendProb for each friend whose item was selected. We run the above simulation with varying parameterswe vary the average proportion of close friends in an individuals network propCloseFrnds, the average eect size of an individuals preference to consume content from a closer friend closeEffect, and the algorithmic updating that serves to privilege content from friends whose content the individual previously selected frdPrefEffect. We set propCloseFrnds with mean values at .55, .60 and .65, based on the range of attitude similarity as documented in (Goel, Mason, and Watts 2010). We set closeEffect to 0 and .05, half the eect size documented in Study 1. Finally, we set the algorithmic frdPrefEffect to 0 and .15. We run this entire process 500 times (e.g., representing 500 users) on every combination of these parameters and report the mean number of items selected from socially close/similar friends in Figure 3.

simProximity <- function(nsim=500, ndays=365, closeProp=1, closeEffect=.025, frdPrefEffect=.15) { # Start simulation: closePicked <- matrix(NA,nsim,ndays) for( j in 1:nsim){ # Generate number of friends based on neg binomial from above nfriends <- rnbinom(n=1, size=2, prob = .01)+50

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# Based on closeProp, generate prop. close friends propCloseFrnds <- logist( rnorm(1, mean = as.numeric(closeProp), sd=.5) ) # Based on this probabilty, which friends are close? friendClose <- rbinom(n=nfriends, size=1, propCloseFrnds) # Update their probability of being seen/picked accordingly. closeProbs <- c(.5 - closeEffect, .5 + closeEffect)[friendClose+1] # Assign propensity to post for each friend: ProbPost <- runif(nfriends)^2 #hist(runif(nfriends)^2,50) # initialize probability of displaying a post from this friend in feed displayFriendProb <- rep(.5, nfriends) # load news feed with content from recommenders for each day: for(i in 1:ndays){ # Simulate posts (poisson) nPosts <- rpois(nfriends, ProbPost) Posted <- which(nPosts!=0) Posts <- rep(Posted, nPosts[Posted]) # Choose 20 posts to display in news feed, weighted by displayFriendProb feed <- sample(x=Posts, size = ifelse(length(Posts)<20, length(Posts), 20), prob = displayFriendProb[Posts]) # pick a few items from newsfeed npick <- rbinom(n=1, size=20, .5) # Here are the PickedItems <size = prob = items that the reader actually picks/reads sample(x=feed, ifelse(length(feed)<npick, length(feed), npick), closeProbs[feed])

# Record Proximity of friends picked: closePicked[j,i] <- mean(friendClose[PickedItems])

# now weight those friends higher when we update the newsfeed the next time displayFriendProb[PickedItems] <- displayFriendProb[PickedItems] + frdPrefEf

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displayFriendProb <- displayFriendProb/max(displayFriendProb) # repeat } if(j %% 20 == 0) print(j) } meanClosePicked <- apply(closePicked, 2, mean,na.rm=T) return(list(homPicked=closePicked, meanClosePicked=meanClosePicked)) }

# Set frdPrefEffect: friend preference effect for updating in news feed. # E.g., % more likely that someone we picked will be picked next time # Set closeEffect: probability of selection based on closeness for each friend # should that friend appear in the news feed. # Set closeProp: a closeophily parameter, a logit-transformed gaussian with mean. # Dwatts find .6 - .7 (various over tie strength) on attitude, set param accordingly. logist <- function(x){ res <- 1/(1 + exp(-x) ) return(res) } #e.g.: mean(logist( rnorm(200, mean= (closeProp=.75) ) )) nsim <- 500 ndays <- 365 # I would also consider plotting a table demonstrating the relationship between time # and Proximity for higher and lower levels of selective exposure. # Need to vary closeProp, frdPrefEffect,closeEffect indata <- expand.grid(closeProp = c(.25, .50, .75), closeEffect = c(0, .05), frdPrefEffect = c(0,.15)) res <- apply(indata, 1, function(x) simProximity(closeProp=x[1], closeEffect=x[2],

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frdPrefEffect=x[3], nsim=nsim, ndays=ndays)) resdf <- list() for(i in 1:length(res)){ # i=1 resdf[[i]] <- data.frame(Time=1:ndays, closeProp=indata[i,1], closeEffect=indata[i,2], frdPrefEffect=indata[i,3], meanClosePicked=res[[i]]$meanClosePicked) } allres <- do.call("rbind", resdf)

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