Understanding and Alleviating Inequalities in Digital News Consumption

ongoing

This project’s vision is to understand and develop strategies to mitigate inequalities in digital news consumption, the acquisition of political knowledge and vulnerability to misinformation. While inequalities in digital news access have been lowered with very high levels of internet access in many countries, there are indications that inequalities in digital news use and the benefits of being exposed to it, like the acquisition of political knowledge, are increasing. Academic literature has been instrumental in describing how digital intermediaries (e.g. social media or search engines) and different modes (mobile devices) have changed the way people consume news, however little attention has been given to how these changes manifest against the backdrop of pre-existing social inequalities in news use and the acquisition of political information. Thus, the project will a) reliably identify digital inequalities in news use, the acquisition of political knowledge, and vulnerability in online misinformation in countries of the Global North and the Global South. In its examination it will focus on b) long-standing informational inequalities related to social class, gender, and age and c) the role of new information technologies like digital intermediaries and mobile devices. Apart from identifying people with low levels of news use, this project will d) explore the ways that parts of the population navigate and face disadvantages in a complex digital media environment. Last, this project, will for the first time, e) test digital public health style interventions that could reduce inequalities in digital news use, political knowledge, and exposure to as well as belief in online misinformation. To achieve these objectives, this project will employ a novel set of methods. Overall, this project will be the first to examine and to find ways to alleviate inequalities in digital news use, using a holistic mixed-methods approach in a Global North/South comparative framework.