Why Don’t We Learn from Social Media? Studying Effects of and Mechanisms behind Social Media News Use on General Surveillance Political Knowledge
Why Don’t We Learn from Social Media? Studying Effects of and Mechanisms behind Social Media News Use on General Surveillance Political Knowledge
复制标题
为什么我们不向社交媒体学习？研究社交媒体新闻使用对一般监控政治知识的影响和机制
DOI：
--
复制
发表时间：
2020
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Peter van Aelst
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Patrick F. A. van Erkel;Peter van Aelst
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，这个老问题引起了新的学术兴趣。特别是，由于公民可以使用 Twitter 和 Facebook 等新渠道，这些渠道日益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在多大程度上提供这些知识。它是通过在比利时（佛兰德斯）进行的一项大型在线调查来实现的，我们在调查中测量了人们对当前政治事件的了解，即所谓的一般监控知识。我们的研究结果表明，与通过传统媒体渠道关注新闻不同，公民不会通过关注社交媒体新闻获得更多政治知识。我们甚至发现关注 Facebook 新闻与政治知识之间存在负相关关系。我们进一步调查为什么会出现这种情况。我们的数据表明，社交媒体上缺乏学习并不是像人们经常认为的那样，是由于狭隘的、个性化的新闻饮食造成的。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，从而减少人们实际学到的东西，特别是对于将社交媒体新闻与其他新闻来源结合起来的公民来说。
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.