DOI: 10.1177/14614448231185764 ISSN: 1461-4448

An issue public’s confirmation-biased news feeding in changing political constellations: A quasi-experimental field study in the German conflict over genome editing

Senja Post, Nils Bienzeisler, Franziska Pannach
  • Sociology and Political Science
  • Communication

Contributing to the study of curated news flows, we investigated how conflicting participants in an issue public fed mainstream news into their Twitter networks. In a quasi-experimental field study in the context of the 2018 European Court of Justice’s ruling on genome editing, we combined standardized manual content analyses of a universe of legacy media news items ( N = 165), users’ tweets (“feeds”) linking these news items ( N = 2014), and users’ profiles ( N = 1070). Confirming existing knowledge, opponents and proponents of genetically modified organisms largely fed news items confirming their issue attitudes. Extending existing knowledge, we show that counter-attitudinal news feeding became more likely when users had a political disadvantage rather than a political advantage in the controversy. However, this was only true for the more active but not for the more inactive news feeders.

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