Accidental exposure to politics on social media as online participation equalizer in Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom

By Augusto Valeriani, Cristian Vaccari. New Media & Society, 2016

311 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We assess whether and how accidental exposure to political information on social media contributes to citizens’ online political participation in comparative perspective. Based on three online surveys of samples representative of German, Italian, and British Internet users in the aftermath of the 2014 European Parliament elections, we find that accidental exposure to political information on social media is positively and significantly correlated with online participation in all three countries, particularly so in Germany where overall levels of participation were lower. We also find that interest in politics moderates this relationship so that the correlation is stronger among the less interested than among the highly interested. These findings suggest that inadvertent encounters with political content on social media are likely to reduce the gap in online engagement between citizens with high and low interest in politics, potentially broadening the range of voices that make themselves heard.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Communication, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e29cd6f77e4cb8466400abf0dddb1cab375f0ee0

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Citations in the corpus

Nathaniel Persily e Joshua A. Tucker (a cura di). Social Media and Democracy. The State of the Field, Prospects for Reform (2021, background): “1995), all these forms of participation are as widespread among the young and among women (Valeriani and Vaccari 2016; Kalogeropoulos et al. 2017).”
“News comes across when I’m in a moment of leisure”: Understanding the practices of incidental news consumption on social media (2018, background): “…the effects of this type of news exposure on matters such as political competence, learning, and participation, and agenda setting and news use (Ardèvol-Abreu et al., 2017; Fletcher and Nielsen, 2018; Kim et al., 2013; Lee, 2009; Oeldorf-Hirsch, 2018; Valenzuela, 2013; Valeriani and Vaccari, 2016).”
The Issue Takes It All? (2019, background): “Hence, the conclusions range between a rather pessimistic view of incidental news exposure increasing existing gaps in political participation (Y. Kim, Chen, and Gil de Zúñiga 2013) and a rather optimistic view of its ability to reduce said gaps (Valeriani and Vaccari 2016).”
Are people incidentally exposed to news on social media? A comparative analysis (2018, methodology): “This, in turn, could have a positive impact on outcomes like political participation and civic engagement, given previous findings (e.g. Gil de Zúñiga et al., 2017; Valeriani and Vaccari, 2016).”