Economics of Digitization Munich, 22–23 November 2019 Partisan Selective Engagement: Evidence from Facebook Marcel Garz, Jil Sörensen, and Daniel F. Stone Partisan Selective Engagement: Evidence from Facebook Marcel Garz, Jönköping International Business School Jil Sörensen, Hamburg Media School and University of Hamburg Daniel F. Stone, Bowdoin College July 2019 We thank Maja Adena, Gregory Martin, Johannes Münster, Gaurav Sood, seminar participants in Hamburg, Jönköping, at the 2018 Leuphana Workshop on Microeconomics, the 2018 Nordic Con- ference on Behavioral and Experimental Economics, the 2019 Economics of Media Bias Workshop, and the 2019 ZEW Conference on the Economics of ICT for helpful comments and suggestions. We are also grateful to Katharina Brunner and Felix Ebert for sharing their extended results on Facebook users’ media preferences. Corresponding author: Marcel Garz, Jönköping In- ternational Business School, P.O Box 1026, SE-551 11 Jönköping. Email:
[email protected] 1 Abstract This study investigates the effects of variation in “congeniality” of news on Facebook user engage- ment (likes, shares, and comments). We compile an original data set of Facebook posts by 84 German news outlets on politicians that were investigated for criminal offenses from January 2012 to June 2017. We also construct an index of each outlet’s media slant by comparing the language of the outlet with that of the main political parties, which allows us to measure the congeniality of the posts. We find evidence that users engaged with congenial posts more than with uncongenial ones, especially in terms of likes. The within-outlet, within-topic design allows us to infer that the greater engagement with congenial news is likely driven by psychological and social factors, rather than a desire for accurate or otherwise instrumental information.