With an unprecedented dataset on the content people watch on their phones, a team of researchers including Kellogg’s Guy Aridor was able to measure how often people watch election news. And the response was so low that they had to recheck their methods.
“In the first two months after we got these results, we said something is wrong because the finding was so surprising,” says Aridor, assistant professor of marketing.
On a typical day in the fall of 2024, the average person in his study encountered only about 13 election-related keywords—less than half of what they would encounter reading a single news article. And of those encounters, only 5 percent happened while viewing apps or news websites.
The researchers also clarified how much of the observed disparity in this exposure was due to systematic personal preference or the policy of apps like Facebook and X to suppress or promote political content. While they confirmed that the volume of election news varied across these platforms, America’s meager political interest was largely driven by people’s own phone habits.
“Everyone has their own little world about the types of content they watch,” says Aridor. “People who use news apps actually seem to get a fair amount of news. It’s just that a lot of people who spend time on Instagram, TikTok or YouTube occasionally experience [terms like] “Donald Trump” and I pass it by very quickly without getting much information. It’s a bit disappointing.”
What people actually see on their phones
For their study, Aridor and colleagues Tevel Dekel, Rafael Jiménez-Durán, Ro’ee Levy, and Lena Song used a list of over 500 election terms (such as “vote,” “debate,” or “election”) and names of politicians, including Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. They worked with consumer engagement firm Screenlake to track how often these keywords appear on the smartphones of many thousands of Americans across all the apps on their phone—including email, messaging, social media, news, music and video, and browser apps. Every time one of these terms appeared on the phone screen, Screenlake’s screen management app counted it as an exposure.
This passive data collection was a leap forward from previous studies, Aridor says, which typically rely on self-reported surveys or URL-based browser data on computers that often overestimate news consumption.
Their study recorded people’s exposure to election terms from September to November 2024, with an average of 1,170 users per day.
In all, the median person saw election keywords on their phone for only about 21 seconds each day—out of a daily average of five and a half hours spent on their phone. Only one in five participants watched election content for more than a minute daily.
Most people’s exposure to the keywords was also scattered throughout the day, not concentrated in a short period of time as one might expect from someone reading the news.
“Other than the very politically engaged, people don’t turn on the news at all,” says Aridor. “They receive campaign exposure sporadically throughout the day. So the low engagement we find is not due to heavy periods of political news consumption.”
The influence effect
This low level of exposure remained stable over the three months of the study. Only two days saw an uptick in election interest: the day of the presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris and Election Day itself. On Election Day, most of the reporting took place after the polls closed, suggesting that people were looking at the results rather than information about how to vote.
But there have been specific events that have increased political exposure for some groups. For example, people with more than average exposure to the keyword “Taylor Swift” saw more political terms in the days after Swift endorsed Kamala Harris on Instagram.
“For the average consumer, it looks like they don’t care about these topics. But when it’s seen by someone relevant to them, like when someone follows Taylor Swift, that can actually lead to increased consumption,” says Aridor. “If people don’t watch or read the news, then what’s shown on social media is what’s shown to them.”
The finding supports several post-election surveys that suggest politicians will need to rely less on traditional media or advertising and more on celebrities and online influencers to raise their profile. Politicians in local congressional races — who were rarely enrolled in the study’s data — see the most benefits from this approach, Aridor says.
“I think if you can find a podcaster that’s very popular in your area, that might be the only way to reach your constituents,” he says. “Basically, it’s a strange world now where these non-political figures can really make a difference, and I think a lot of politicians seem to recognize that.”
Platform versus user effects
The researchers also looked at whether political decisions made from social media platforms affected people’s exposure to political information.
In 2024, Meta was announced that they will stop recommending political posts to Facebook, Instagram and Threads users (a decision they would reverse in early 2025). Conversely, studies found that Platform X put more political content into its users’ feeds in the run-up to the election. Aridor and colleagues found that these policies did affect exposure to election content. Regular Facebook and Instagram users saw fewer posts about politics, while users on X saw more (and about 43 times more content on owner Elon Musk).
But did these platform decisions explain the differences the researchers saw in the consumption of election-related content? Because they could track what people see across their apps, they could reveal the influence of systematic differences in exposure across apps (the app effect) or across individuals (the individual effect). They found that while there were significant app effects, individual effects largely dominated what people saw.
“Although we document these differences between apps, it’s actually not the main reason people don’t consume political news,” Aridor said. “It’s because they obviously don’t want to.”
This finding has important implications for policymakers, who have considered regulating the algorithms on social media platforms that control what users see. The problem, Aridor believes, is much bigger than “censorship”.
“It would be nice to say, ‘Oh, it’s just because Facebook is lower-ranked news; that’s why people aren’t consuming it,'” he says. “Because it’s a lot easier to fix than to understand why people don’t want to engage with the news.”
All the news that suits you
Instead of actively suppressing political news or promoting particular views, social media and streaming content may have simply become too effective at giving people what they want.
“They’ve gotten really good at personalization to the point where you don’t even need to give clear messages of ‘I’m following this person because I like this,'” says Aridor. “I think the change over the last four years has made a big difference in the fragmentation of content.”
In a sense, this makes it easier than ever for people to find content on their favorite niche. But it can also distance people from the information they need to keep up with candidates and issues and participate in democracy.
“If Facebook makes it so that you don’t read the news and that makes you less informed—which changes the way you vote and your political attitudes—that matters socially,” says Aridor.
