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News Feeds and User Engagement: Evidence from the Reddit News Tab

Author(s)
Moehring, Alex
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Advisor
Tucker, Catherine
Terms of use
In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted Copyright MIT http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC-EDU/1.0/
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Abstract
We study how the introduction of a new non-personalized news feed impacts user engagement quantity, quality, and diversity on Reddit. In June 2018, Reddit introduced the News tab on iOS devices that surfaces popular content from a curated list of news-related communities. We leverage this natural experiment to identify the causal effects of the News tab on iOS user engagement in a difference-in-differences design. We find that the News tab increases the share of iOS devices that engage with news-related content and there is a relatively larger increase in low-quality engagement, measured through voting on the platform. We also find that the diversity of engagement within news categories and within articles from publishers across the political spectrum increases as a result of the News tab. These results suggest that non-personalized feeds can be an important tool to mitigate algorithmic filter bubbles, and need not come at the expense of reduced user engagement.
Date issued
2022-02
URI
https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/143154
Department
Sloan School of Management
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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