ABSTRACT

Does exposure to news affect what people know about politics? This old question attracted new scholarly interest as the political information environment is changing rapidly. In particular, since citizens have new channels at their disposal, such as Twitter and Facebook, which increasingly complement or even replace traditional channels of information. This study investigates to what extent citizens have knowledge about daily politics and to what extent news on social media can provide this knowledge. It does so by means of a large online survey in Belgium (Flanders), in which we measured what people know about current political events, their so-called general surveillance knowledge. Our findings demonstrate that unlike following news via traditional media channels, citizens do not gain more political knowledge from following news on social media. We even find a negative association between following the news on Facebook and political knowledge. We further investigate why this is the case. Our data demonstrate that this lack of learning on social media is not due to a narrow, personalized news diet, as is often suggested. Rather, we find evidence that following news via social media increases a feeling of information overload, which decreases what people actually learn, especially for citizens who combine news via social media with other news sources.

摘要

接触新闻会影响人们对政治的了解吗？随着政治信息环境的迅速变化，这个古老的问题引起了新的学术兴趣。特别是，由于公民可以使用新的渠道，例如 Twitter 和 Facebook，它们越来越多地补充甚至取代了传统的信息渠道。这项研究调查了公民对日常政治的了解程度以及社交媒体上的新闻可以提供这种知识的程度。它通过在比利时（佛兰德斯）进行的一项大型在线调查来实现，其中我们衡量了人们对当前政治事件的了解，即他们所谓的一般监视知识。我们的研究结果表明，与通过传统媒体渠道关注新闻不同，公民并没有通过在社交媒体上关注新闻获得更多的政治知识。我们甚至发现在 Facebook 上关注新闻与政治知识之间存在负相关。我们进一步调查为什么会这样。我们的数据表明，社交媒体上缺乏学习并不是由于人们经常建议的狭隘、个性化的新闻饮食。相反，我们发现有证据表明通过社交媒体关注新闻会增加信息过载的感觉，这会减少人们实际学到的东西，特别是对于通过社交媒体将新闻与其他新闻来源结合起来的公民。