Keyword – curated flows

Burai, Krisztina:

(Un)following for political reasons?

The proliferation of the internet and social networking sites has created a medium that enables users to access a wide range of news sources, and the multitude of content available means that citizens are forced to choose from the content available, for which the platform in the focus of my research, Facebook, offers a number of possibilities. My research attempts to answer the question of whether users use the various functions for managing political content on Facebook, which can reinforce the homogenisation of the information. This question is explored through a survey of 1,000 people, representative of key demographics. The findings show that only a small part of users use the positive or negative newsfeed editing features regularly.

Keywords: curated flows, Facebook, social media, political communication