Online News Sharing in the Face of Mixed Audiences: Context Collapse, Homophily, and Types of Social Media

ABSTRACT

Extending the focus on the potential for context collapse in news diffusion to diverse audiences, we investigated whether and how news sharers took account of audience characteristics to reach audiences from diverse contexts, interacted only with similar others, or remained silent (to avoid social risks). Results from surveys of 395 individuals suggest that depending on the symmetricity of social media environments, different types of similarity between news sharers and their audience increased news sharing in different ways, but the extent of context collapse did not. Implications for news sharing with similar social media audiences are discussed.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary Material

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Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2018S1A5B8070398). This article has been conducted by the Research Grant of Kwangwoon University in 2020.

Notes on contributors

Eun-Mee Kim

Eun-mee Kim (Ph.D., Northwestern University) is a professor in the Department of Communication at Seoul National University. Her research interests include the use of digital media and its social and cultural implications.

Jennifer Ihm

Jennifer Ihm (Ph.D., Northwestern) is an assistant professor in the School of Media and Communications at Kwangwoon University. Her research investigates how information and communication technologies (ICTs) can contribute to more community engagement and how online engagement can extend to offline environment.