Discussion
Social media have become one of the primary platforms for news consumption, contributing to the flow of information essential for subsequent political discussion and policy debates. However, there has been increasing concern over social media’s role in reducing exposure to ideologically cross-cutting information and opinions. Sunstein (2001), for example, contended that the diversity of public discourse on the Internet has been largely limited due to people’s tendency to self-select into ideological enclaves in which only similar viewpoints get to be heard. This study extends the discussion on online information flow by considering how user actions might change and reshape the current information environment. Specifically, we examine pathways to news sharing in the digital age, providing a micro-level explanatory mechanism underlying people’s decision to share a news article. We argue that news sharing constitutes a “soft” form of political participation that has implications for the collective construction of social reality. Compared to other hard forms of political participation such as voting, news sharing has real political consequences by shaping user-directed information flow and thus affecting the quality of information available to the public. This is especially relevant in a society where falsehoods travel faster than truth (Vosoughi, Roy, & Aral, 2018) and disinformation campaigns are prevalent (Prier, 2017).
