Digital News Consumption: Evidence from Smartphone Content in the 2024 US Elections

Guy Aridor, Tevel Dekel, Jiménez-Durán, Rafael, Ro'ee Levy and Lena Song

No 20957, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: Using novel smartphone content data, we document that exposure to election-related content for the median American is arguably small. Moreover, exposure rarely comes from news apps and instead mostly occurs through non-traditional sources, such as social media and video apps. While the median was low, we find substantial heterogeneity: individuals in the 90th percentile consume over 50 times the content of those in the 10th percentile. A variance decomposition shows that apps play a role in driving exposure gaps (e.g., X versus Facebook), but individual characteristics (e.g., living in a swing state) are the dominant drivers of election-related exposure.

Date: 2025-12
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