Luca Braghieri, Bocconi University

“The slant of online news”

Abstract

The increased reliance on social media for news consumption has generated widespread concern. In particular, many worry that the structure of the social network and the algorithm governing users’ newsfeeds leads to the formation of “echo-chambers” and “filter-bubbles” that promote the consumption of partisan news (Sunstein, 2017). Although almost ubiquitous in the popular press, worries about polarized news consumption on social media have received relatively little empirical substantiation from the academic literature (Guess, Nyhan, and Reifer, 2018). In this paper: i) we propose and implement a new method to assign slant to individual news articles; ii) we show that our fine-grained measure of slant delivers an estimate of the degree of polarization in news consumption on Facebook that is substantially higher than the estimates obtained with the coarser measures commonly employed in the literature.

Luca Braghieri is Assistant Professor in the department of Decision Sciences at Bocconi University. I received a PhD in Economics from Stanford University and a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics from Harvard University.

He is also affiliated with CEPR, CESifo, IGIER (the Innocenzo Gasperini Insitute for Economic Research at Bocconi), and BLESS (the Bocconi Experimental Laboratory for the Social Sciences).

Most of his work is on topics related to applied microeconomics, behavioral economics, and political economy.

You can read more about Luca Braghieri here

CEBI contact: Felix Chopra