Pathways to Fragmentation:User Flows and Web Distribution Infrastructures

This study analyzes how web audiences flow across online digital features. We construct a directed network of user flows based on sequential user clickstreams for all popular websites (n=1761), using traffic data obtained from a panel of a million web users in the United States. We analyze these data to identify constellations of websites that are frequently browsed together in temporal sequences, both by similar user groups in different browsing sessions as well as by disparate users. Our analyses thus render visible previously hidden online collectives and generate insight into the varied roles that curatorial infrastructures may play in shaping audience fragmentation on the web

The Rise of the Global South on the World Wide Web: Bridging Internet Policies and Web User Behavior

Scholars of internet governance have traditionally focused on how institutions such as sovereign nation states and multilateral organizations establish public policy. In doing so, experts and policy makers often presume the impact of Internet policies on Internet usage, but rarely do they examine usage aggregated from the behavior of individual web users. In this study, authors Harsh Taneja and Angela Xiao Wu examine the relationship between internet governance and internet user behavior, empirically investigating web user behavior on a global scale. The authors utilize web use data from ComScore to construct a network for the 1,000 most visited websites globally in September 2009, 2011 and 2013. Analysis of these networks revealed a number of “clusters” of websites, whereby sites within the cluster had more users in common than they did with sites outside the cluster. In each of the three years, the most salient means upon which websites clustered together were both language and geography (and not content type). Thus, the authors interpret such clusters as online expressions of place-based cultures, or “regional cultures”, with data suggesting a de-Americanization and rise of the Global South on the WWW since 2009

Distrust Profiles: Identifying the Factors That Shape Journalism's Credibility Crisis

Trust in news is declining globally and has been for some time a phenomenon that has been amplified in the context of a global pandemic, the rise in anti-media populism, and social and political unrest. Overall, public trust in journalism remains low (44% globally), according to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2021. Building on a growing body of research on predictors of (dis)trust among news audiences, this study examines survey data from the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2021 to explore distrust profiles - comparative profiles of users based on their relative distrust in news in general, news they consume, and news accessed through digital intermediaries like social and search - across distinct news environments: India, South Korea, and the US. We conclude that, across all three countries, there are large segments who either trust everything or distrust everything, suggesting a trust polarization phenomenon. Moreover, the results identify segments of swing trusters, users who trust some news and distrust other types but do not indicate a blanket tendency to trust or distrust everything. Normative expectations about the institution of journalism (i.e., folk theories) seem to be the most powerful factors in explaining the relative likelihood of membership in all profiles, where expectations regarding impartiality, concern about fake news, and fair coverage were important indicators of (dis)trust, with varying degrees depending on the media, political, and technological contexts in which they are situated. These findings suggest that to regain trust, journalists should consider how they can change people's folk theories when it comes to news by comprehensively taking into account the unique trajectory of a given country's media system

Web use remains highly regional even in the age of global platform monopolies

The Internet, since its inception, has been imagined as a technology that enables information to overcome barriers of language and geography. As a handful of social media platforms now dominate globally, removing most barriers of distribution; this has created unprecedented opportunities for content to gain worldwide traction, regardless of its country of origin. Yet historically with few exceptions, people generally consume content that is from or for their region. Has the Internet or social media really altered this trait? Analyzing the extent of similarities between a hundred countries’ web use patterns simultaneously across their most popular websites, and country specific trends from YouTube and Twitter respectively, we find that countries which share borders or where people speak the same languages have the most similar web use patterns. Global social media usage on both YouTube and Twitter is even more heterogeneous and driven to a larger extent by language and geography than global website traffic. Neither does high prevalence of English language speakers in the two countries, nor does one of them being the United States contributes substantially to web use similarity. Global web use remains highly regional. The technical affordances of the Internet alone are thus insufficient to render a cosmopolitan world