Tracing Knowledge Gaps: Investigating the Influence of Education on News Exposure and Knowledge Using Digital Trace Data

The knowledge gap hypothesis—the assumption that an increasing flow of news on a topic fosters a gap in knowledge between the more and the less educated—has been demonstrated in numerous studies throughout the past 60 years. Knowledge gaps are attributed to individual differences in media selection and information processing capacities. However, it has been difficult to investigate the relative influence of selection and processing with conventional research methods. We used an innovative combination of individual-level digital trace and survey data collected in Switzerland ( n = 403) and Germany ( n = 471) to study the widening of knowledge gaps throughout the communication process. The data were collected at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, an extraordinary period of extremely high information inflow on a novel topic. Our analyses show that individuals with lower education use less online news in general and less COVID-19-related news in particular than those with higher education, which results in a difference in knowledge about the origin of COVID-19 (but not on its severity). However, those with lower education do not have a similar share of COVID-19-related news in their news diet, and they learn even more than those with higher education from the COVID-19-related news that they are exposed to. Our study thus suggests that knowledge gaps are predominantly a result of selecting into news use.