Most political content on smartphones appears in brief, fleeting bursts

A new study analyzing nearly five million smartphone screenshots over a two-week period found that most political content people encounter on their devices appears in short bursts lasting only a few seconds. Moreover, the majority of this content came from sources other than traditional news media. The findings were published in the Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media.

The way people consume news has undergone dramatic changes over the past century. Less than a hundred years ago, newspapers and magazines were the primary sources of information. In the latter half of the 20th century, television became a dominant medium, with scheduled broadcasts becoming a daily ritual in many households. But the rise of the internet has since disrupted this model, replacing rigid scheduling with constant, on-demand access to news.

The internet allows people to access information instantly, at any time. This shift has led to real-time news consumption, facilitated by websites, apps, and especially social media platforms. Social media has revolutionized news delivery by enabling users to receive personalized content and rapidly share information. Meanwhile, the proliferation of smartphones has made it possible to access news from virtually anywhere, further reinforcing the internet’s role as the primary medium for news. These developments have sped up the pace of news consumption and emphasized personalization and immediacy.

In this study, lead author Daniel Muise and his colleagues set out to examine how people are exposed to political content via their smartphones. They wanted to understand how often political content appears on users’ screens, how this exposure varies across individuals and over time, and how long these encounters last.

The researchers recruited 115 participants through Qualtrics, ensuring diversity in gender, age, and geographic region within the United States. Participants, who ranged in age from 21 to 68, were compensated $30 for installing an application that took screenshots of their smartphone activity multiple times per day over a two-week period.

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In total, the app captured just under 5 million screenshots across all participants. Given the scale of the data, the researchers manually classified a small subset of screenshots and used those to train an automated system to classify the remainder.

The results showed that participants’ smartphone screens were active for an average of 4.6 hours per day, though this varied widely—from less than 10 minutes to nearly 18 hours per day. Political content was relatively rare, appearing in only about 93,000 screenshots, or slightly under 2% of the total.

There was substantial variation in individual exposure. While many participants spent just a few seconds per day viewing political content, one participant averaged over an hour daily. Likewise, while political content accounted for virtually none of the screen time for most users, a few individuals devoted 10–12% of their smartphone use to it.

Importantly, political content typically appeared in short bursts. The distribution of viewing durations followed a power-law curve: the vast majority of content was extremely brief, and longer exposures were increasingly rare. This pattern held true across different apps and users, reinforcing the conclusion that political content on smartphones tends to be fleeting.

Surprisingly, the researchers found that most political content did not come from traditional news sources or even social media. Instead, it appeared in a range of other formats—suggesting that political exposure through smartphones may be far more fragmented and incidental than previously assumed.

“Political content exposure is best measured in seconds, meaning that audiences’ habits for understanding the political world is butting up against the lower temporal bound of genuine cognitive engagement, and straddling faster types of processing with timescales all their own. An encounter with political content can still lead to a thirty-minute viewing session on television, or an hour-long radio program, but to move forward in the field, we must incorporate the flash of a meme, or a comment scrolled-by in a feed. Each of these instances means that media effects are likely determined as much or more by temporal scale of message exposures as by message content,” study authors concluded.

The study sheds light on the access to political contents via smartphones. However, it should be noted that the data collection method did not allow study authors to determine how much attention participants were paying to the contents or whether they sought the political contents they viewed or just ran into them unintentionally (e.g. while watching reels or just scrolling through social media).

The paper, “(Mis)measurement of Political Content Exposure within the Smartphone Ecosystem: Investigating Common Assumptions,” was authored by Daniel Muise, David M. Markowitz,Byron Reeves, and Nilam Ram.