The skilled and the interested: How personal curation skills increase or decrease exposure to political information on social media
- Author(s)
- Brigitte Naderer, Raffael Heiss, Jörg Matthes
- Abstract
For social media to be beneficial for democracy, citizens have to actively expose themselves to political information to become informed and politically active. To foster such political exposure, individuals need to be competent and interested to seek political information. In this study, we investigate the roles of digital media literacy (i.e., personal curation skills) and personal interest (i.e., political interest) in order to predict exposure to political information on social media. Furthermore, we investigate how exposure to political information on social media is then connected to citizen’s level of political knowledge and their intention to vote. Results of a 2-wave panel study (N = 559) indicate that personal curation skills indeed foster exposure to political information, but only for politically interested individuals. Individuals with lower levels of political interest use their personal curation skills to avoid political information. Additionally, exposure to political content on social media may induce a less positive effect than previously expected. We found that political exposure on social media did not affect individuals’ levels of political knowledge. However, we did find some weak evidence that it might stimulate individuals’ voting intentions in electoral times.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Communication
- External organisation(s)
- MCI Management Center Innsbruck, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
- Journal
- Journal of Information Technology & Politics
- Volume
- 17
- Pages
- 452-460
- No. of pages
- 9
- ISSN
- 1933-1681
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2020.1742843
- Publication date
- 2020
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 508007 Communication science, 508014 Journalism
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Computer Science(all), Sociology and Political Science, Public Administration
- Portal url
- https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/en/publications/the-skilled-and-the-interested-how-personal-curation-skills-increase-or-decrease-exposure-to-political-information-on-social-media(19830817-156e-4ff8-a73d-d84920dcb7b1).html