The study suggests that media consumers favor certain websites not only due to their content but also due to their audience. A new concept is introduced: ” audience homophily, ” which describes one’s preference for partisan media websites catering to a homogeneous, likeminded consumership. This attraction is explained in terms of the need for self-consistency, and I suggest that over time such behavior will polarize political identity through a spiral of reinforcement. Based on both a survey-experiment (N = 300) and a panel study combined with web-tracking technology that recorded …
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This article explores Facebook unfriending during the Israel–Gaza conflict of 2014. We suggest that politically motivated unfriending is a new kind of political gesture. We present an analysis of a survey of 1,013 Jewish Israeli Facebook users. A total of 16% of users unfriended or unfollowed a Facebook friend during the fighting. Unfriending was more prevalent among more ideologically extreme and more politically active Facebook users. Weak ties were most likely to be broken, and respondents mostly unfriended people because they took offense at what they had posted or disagreed with it.
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