Determinants and Consequences of Incidental Exposure to Dissonant Political Information on Faceboo

The development of communication technologies has brought about remarkable changes in the media environment and generated debates about its influence on the functioning of democracy. A fundamental question is whether these changes keep citizens informed about the competing perspectives of both sides or completely enclosed in an echo chamber. This dissertation contributes to the literature by focusing on a particular mechanism, incidental exposure, through which individuals could encounter some dissonant political information on Facebook.;Drawing on a panel survey and a laboratory experiment, this dissertation explores the determinants and consequences of incidental exposure to dissonant political information on Facebook. The frequency of Facebook use is found positively associated with incidental exposure to dissonant political information and this relationship is fully mediated by network heterogeneity. Once individuals incidentally encounter counter-attitudinal posts on Facebook, they are able to recognize and even recall some details of these posts, suggesting the learning effects of incidental exposure. Particularly, when the Facebook posts are endorsed by many others, the eye-tracking data indicate that individuals will spend more time on the area and return to the area more frequently in the course of browsing the Facebook page. As a result, they are better able to recognize these heavily-endorsed counter-attitudinal posts.;As for the behavioral consequences, this dissertation does not find a direct impact of incidental exposure to dissonant political information on corrective political participation. Nevertheless, further investigation reveals that this link is moderated by selective exposure. Incidental exposure to dissonant political information has a positive impact on corrective political participation only among individuals who rarely seek out likeminded information on Facebook. In order to better understand the mechanism underlying the behavioral consequence of incidental exposure, this dissertation further explores the indirect effects of anger and anxiety. The findings indicate that incidental exposure to counter-attitudinal posts indirectly encourages corrective political participation via anxiety, but not via anger. Additionally, the indirect effects of anxiety only exist among individuals who consider the covered issue in the Facebook posts relevant to their own well-being. Implications are discussed in terms of the influence of social media use on deliberative and participatory democracies.