Name
Brendan Nyhan, "Promoting Sources With Diverse Partisan Audiences Enhances News Feed Quality Without Reducing Engagement"
Date & Time
Thursday, October 16, 2025, 10:00 AM - 10:25 AM
Speakers
Brendan Nyhan, Dartmouth College "Promoting Sources With Diverse Partisan Audiences Enhances News Feed Quality Without Reducing Engagement" Social media are a major source of news for Americans. What people see on these platforms is shaped by recommendation algorithms, which rank posts to keep users engaged. In the process, they can reduce exposure to cross-cutting content and amplify the spread of pro-attitudinal messages, including false rumors and toxic content. It is therefore vital to consider alternative methods for ranking content that people see on social media.
However, little is known about the effect of alternative ranking approaches on user engagement, which may deter their use by platforms. In a preregistered field experiment, we show that promoting sources with diverse partisan audiences increases engagement with trustworthy news outlets without reducing total engagement. Our study is the first to independently test these effects using content inventories drawn in part from participant Twitter/X accounts and to estimate their effects on real (not hypothetical) behaviors such as actual clicks, likes, and retweets. We also show that the effects are sometimes larger among Republicans, who engage differentially more with reliable news outlets when content is re-ranked by partisan audience diversity.
These findings highlight the importance of interventions that account for the interdependent nature of human and algorithmic behavior. Practically, our results suggest a novel policy that would help social media companies improve the quality of the news people see without reducing activity on their platforms. Going forward, these findings should stimulate the development of novel recommendation algorithms and prompt further investigation into new ways for independent researchers to study online platform behavior. Brendan Nyhan is the James O. Freedman Presidential Professor in the Department of Government at Dartmouth College. Nyhan, a former Professor of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a former Guggenheim Fellow and Carnegie Fellow. He is co-director of Bright Line Watch, a watchdog monitoring the status of American democracy; a former contributor to The Upshot at The New York Times; co-founder of Spinsanity, a non-partisan watchdog of political spin syndicated in the Philadelphia Inquirer; and co-author of All the President's Spin, a New York Times bestseller.
Location Name
Kline Tower 14th Floor
Full Address
Kline Tower
219 Prospect St, 14th Floor
New Haven, CT 06511
United States
Session Type
Lecture
