From personalized news curation to shared issue concerns in fragmentation era: a dynamic network approach by levels of issue involvement

As the phrase ‘no issue, no public’ signifies, attention to shared issues brings strangers together. The erosion of shared issue awareness threatens social consensus-building and democratic decision-making. In an era increasingly characterized by personalized news curation, understanding what fosters issue overlap between individuals becomes crucial. Using stochastic actor-oriented modeling with digital log data and survey data, we identified underlying mechanisms that lead to the formation of a shared-issue network and its interplay with personalized news curation during a presidential election – a period that increases political issue salience and likely catalyzes the formation of shared awareness. We examined how this likelihood unfolds differently by the level of involvement in politics. Our findings reveal that the likelihood of forming shared-issue relations increases over time through reduced susceptibility to ideological homophily, greater accumulation of political knowledge, and active manual filtering promoting genre-diverse news exposure. Notably, highly involved individuals diversified, rather than narrowed, their exposure as the election approached. The co-evolution dynamics between personalized news curation and shared issue relations further highlight the importance of diverse genre exposure for increasing issue overlap. Our findings show that general interests tend to develop into specialized interests across a wider array of issues, whereas specialized interests are less likely to broaden back into more general interests. This research extends scholarly discourse beyond individual-level news consumption to network-level issue-sharing dynamics. It provides implications for digital news platform designs and news literacy education, while enhancing our understanding of the evolving public discourse landscape shaped by both low-and-high involvement citizens.