Tech Policy

As Donald Trump prepares to assume the presidency for the second time, and as Elon Musk prepares to begin his appointed position as co-head (along with Vivek Ramaswamy) of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, we are entering a new and unprecedented moment in American politics.

How does the Internet affect the likelihood of citizens being exposed to information that may contradict their existing views? To address this question, we measured the degree of ideological segregation in the market for online news and compare it with other news sources.

Analyzing data on the news consumption habits of a panel of Internet users, we define for each news outlet the share of users who report their political outlook as ‘conservative’ among those who report being either ‘conservative’ or ‘liberal’.

Our results indicate that the degree to which liberals and conservatives are isolated from each other’s opinions is low in absolute terms. The average Internet news consumer’s exposure to conservatives is 57%. The average conservative’s exposure is 60.6%, similar to a person who gets all her news from USA Today. The average liberal’s exposure is 53.1%, similar to a person who gets all her news from CNN. News consumers with extremely high or low exposure are rare.

Although many people go to sites with ideologically tilted audiences, such as Fox News or the Huffington Post, these are typically part of a news diet with heavy doses of more moderate sites. Nevertheless, the segregation of online news is higher than for some other media: the isolation index for the Internet is 7.5 percentage points, which compares with 1.8 for broadcast television news, 3.3 for cable television news, 4.7 for magazines and 4.8 for local newspapers. But the segregation of online news is lower than national newspapers, for which the index is 10.4.

We estimate that eliminating the Internet would reduce the ideological segregation of news and opinion consumption across all media from 5.1 to 4.1.