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Information Diets Are More Diverse in Attention Than in Engagement

By on July 21, 2026 in Articles

Christopher Barrie, Aybuke Atalay, Alia ElKattan

Sociological Science July 21, 2026
10.15195/v13.a33

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What political content do we pay attention to online? Diverse political information is essential for democratic competence, yet online media raises concerns about fragmented information diets. Research on selective exposure highlights how social media can foster ideological echo chambers, while other studies emphasize incidental exposure to diverse viewpoints. A critical measurement challenge is that public platform traces often observe engagement (e.g., likes or shares) more readily than lower-visibility forms of attention—i.e., what users notice or choose to read without necessarily interacting publicly. In this study, we address this gap with a social media clone platform that separately records attention and engagement. We ran the study in both the United Kingdom (once) and the United States (thrice). Across both contexts, we found that the ideology-engagement association is significantly larger than the ideology-attention association. This underscores the importance of measuring attention, rather than solely engagement, to accurately assess the diversity of online information diets.

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Christopher Barrie: Department of Sociology, New York University.
E-mail: cb5691@nyu.edu

Aybuke Atalay: Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Edinburgh.
E-mail: aybuke.atalay@ed.ac.uk

Alia ElKattan: Department of Politics, New York University.
E-mail: alia.elkattan@nyu.edu

Acknowledgments: We thank audiences at the NYU Center for Social Media and Politics for their feedback on earlier versions of this paper. This research was supported by a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant (SRG2223 230865). OpenAI GPT-4o and GPT-5 and Anthropic Claude (Sonnet 4.5) were used for code, code review, and manuscript redrafting. The authors declare no competing interests. Corresponding author: Christopher Barrie (cb5691@nyu.edu).


Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: Data, code, documentation, and replication materials necessary to re-produce the empirical and simulation results reported in this article are available at https://github.com/cjbarrie/smclone.


  • Citation: Barrie, Christopher, Aybuke Atalay, and Alia ElKattan. 2026. “Information Diets Are More Diverse in Attention Than in Engagement” Sociological Science 13: 864-883.
  • Received: April 9, 2026
  • Accepted: June 8, 2026
  • Editors: Ari Adut, Kieran Healy
  • DOI: 10.15195/v13.a33


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Echo Chambers Are Defined by Conflict, Not Isolation

By on May 11, 2026 in Articles

Anna Keuchenius, Petter Törnberg, Justus Uitermark

Sociological Science May 11, 2026
10.15195/v13.a22

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The influential “echo chamber” hypothesis suggests that social media drive polarization through a mutual reinforcement between isolation and radicalization. The existence of such echo chambers has been a central focus of academic debate, with competing studies finding ostensibly contradictory empirical evidence. This article identifies a fundamental methodological limitation of these empirical studies: they do not differentiate between negative and positive interactions. To overcome this limitation, we develop a method to extract signed network representations of Twitter/X debates using machine learning. Applying our approach to a major Dutch cultural controversy, we show that the inclusion of negative interactions provides a new empirical picture of the dynamics of online polarization. Our findings suggest that conflict, not isolation, is at the heart of polarization.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.


Anna Keuchenius: Sociology, University of Amsterdam
E-mail: anna@keuchenius.com.

Petter Törnberg: Computational Social Science, University of Amsterdam
E-mail: p.tornberg@uva.nl

Justus Uitermark: Human Geography Planning and International Development Studies
University of Amsterdam, E-mail: j.l.uitermark@uva.nl

Financial Disclosure: This research has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement no. 732942, project ODYCCEUS.


Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: The data and code underlying this article are available as part of our replication materials available at this link: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.30948659.v1 or the DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.30948659. Due to Twitter/X’s Terms of Service and ethical and legal obligations, we do not share tweet text, user IDs, or any data that could identify individuals or their stance in the debate. The dataset contains sensitive information, including political opinions, and releasing identifiable content would pose ethical risks to users and violate GDPR requirements. To support replication, we provide code, documentation, and non-identifying data sufficient to reproduce all analytical steps, with full analyses possible via rehydration of tweet IDs.


  • Citation: Keuchenius, Anna, Petter Törnberg, and Justus Uitermark. 2026. “Echo Chambers Are Defined by Conflict, Not Isolation” Sociological Science 13: 565-588
  • Received: January 8, 2025
  • Accepted: January 12, 2026
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Bart Bonikowski
  • DOI: 10.15195/v13.a22


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Partisanship Meets Social Networks: How Politically Heterogeneous Acquaintances and Close Relationships Buffer Partisan Animosity

By on July 7, 2025 in Articles

Delia Baldassarri, Jona de Jong

Sociological Science July 7, 2025
10.15195/v12.a18

Abstract

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Politically heterogeneous social networks have long been considered as a safeguard against political division. However, in today’s polarized political climate, the effectiveness of cross-partisan interactions in mitigating animosity is increasingly questioned. Prior research emphasizes the importance of hearing-the-other-side through cross-partisan discussions with close ties. We confirm that these discussions still take place and are related to lower inter-partisan animosity. Moreover, we propose a complementary mechanism, seeing-the-other-side, according to which even brief interactions with out-partisan acquaintances serve to reduce distorted views of out-partisans, thereby lowering inter-partisan hostility. Using original data from the United States, we find that both close tie and acquaintance networks display significant political heterogeneity and this heterogeneity is associated with lower partisan animosity. Experimentally, we show that reducing misperceptions by increasing the salience of similarities between in-partisan and out-partisan acquaintances further reduces hostility. These findings highlight the continued relevance of everyday political diversity in tempering partisan divisions and nuance worries about partisan echo chambers.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Delia Baldassarri: Professor, Department of Sociology, New York University
E-mail: delia.b@nyu.edu

Jona de Jong: Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Sociology, Utrecht University
E-mail: j.f.dejong2@uu.nl

Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: Data and related code necessary to produce the results are publicly available here: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/6ISNQQ.

  • Citation: Baldassarri, Delia, Jona de Jong. 2025. “Partisanship Meets Social Networks: How Politically Heterogeneous Acquaintances and Close Relationships Buffer Partisan Animosity” Sociological Science 12: 409-430.
  • Received: March 17, 2025
  • Accepted: March 28, 2025
  • Editors: Ari Adut, Stephen Vaisey
  • DOI: 10.15195/v12.a18

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