You know the joke: one dark night, a policeman comes on a drunk rootling around under a street lamp. When asked what he’s doing, the guy says that he’s looking for his car keys. “Is this where you dropped them?” asks the cop. “No,” comes the reply. “Well, then why look for them here?” “Because at least here I can see what I’m doing.”

This joke has often come to mind since 2016 when reading explanations – especially media explanations – of the Brexit vote and Trump’s election. The general tenor is that it was all down to social media, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in particular.

This has always seemed implausible to me. While it would obviously be ridiculous to deny that social media played some role in these political upheavals, it would be foolish to assign it the critical role. Apart from anything else, putting social media centre stage ignores what had been happening to democratic electorates during decades of globalisation, neoliberal economic policy, rising inequality and austerity. But because the rise of Facebook et al was one of the biggest changes over the last two decades, the temptation to see them as the place to look for explanations seems to have been well-nigh irresistible.

Fortunately, it was resisted by researchers at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism in Oxford when they set out to understand where UK voters got their news during the 2019 general election. They tracked the online news consumption of 1,711 people aged 18-65 across mobile and desktop devices throughout the campaign and also surveyed a subset of 752 panellists before and after the vote. What the researchers were seeking to understand was the relative importance for voters of offline and online news and their attitudes to the media and politics more widely.

Their findings make intriguing reading, not least because they challenge some of the anecdotal conventional wisdom about the predominance of social media. Although online news sources (including news websites/apps and social media) were more widely used than any other source among those with internet access, BBC News was by far the most widely used online source for election news. It was accessed by 44% of the sample during the course of the election and was their main destination for election results.

Online news during the campaign was, the researchers report, “a winner-takes-most market, with just two providers, the BBC News and the MailOnline, accounting for nearly half (48%) the time spent with news and the top five (including the Guardian, the Sun, and the Mirror) accounting for two-thirds (66%) of the time spent”.

Cheery news for traditional news outlets, then? Er, not entirely. Only 3% of all internet time was spent with news. On average, people spent just 16 minutes per week online with news and made around 22 news visits each week. And young people (aged 18-34) were even less engaged with online news websites, spending only eight minutes a week and visiting fewer sites.

This could be because a winter election in a country that had already been bored to distraction by Brexit was never likely to attract much interest, especially among younger voters. Even so, eight minutes a week is a bit scary, especially when it turns out that 13% of those people got election news only from social media.

What about the filter bubbles and echo chambers then? Here the report challenges conventional wisdom. Although the researchers found some evidence for partisan selectivity, they also discovered “a lot of cross-cutting exposure (especially among those who rely on social media) and little evidence of partisan selective avoidance”. Even more interesting, very few people consumed news solely from outlets supporting the party they voted for, while there was little evidence of influence of the really partisan outfits such as the Canary and Novara Media on the left or Breitbart on the right. Similarly, foreign sites such as Russia Today and Sputnik attracted just 1% of the time spent with news, which amounts to about 0.02% of the time people spent online during the election. So much for Russian propaganda.

Of course this is just one survey of one – perhaps atypical – election. But it’s a welcome reminder that the role of social media in news consumption may be less dominant than we had come to think. The fact that two-thirds of the sample got their news from the online offerings of five traditional journalistic outfits, for example, is a cheering thought, even if one disapproves of some of the five. It chimes with the recent findings of the Pew survey in the US, which says that 64% of Americans still get their local news from TV or news websites, compared with 15% from social media.

And, as a nice kicker, the Oxford researchers found that “the majority of those who expressed a view felt the BBC had done a good job. BBC stories were widely viewed and read equally by Conservative and Labour voters.” That should make some of those Beeb-hating Tory MPs choke on their muesli.

What I’m reading

Classic Dom

“Inside the mind of Dominic Cummings” is a terrific analysis by Stefan Collini in the Guardian of the thinking of the UK’s new project manager in chief.

Privacy on parade

If you thought we’ve scraped the bottom of the privacy barrel, think again, is the verdict of A World Without Privacy Will Revive the Masquerade, a very thoughtful essay in the Atlantic by Jonathan Zittrain.

Computer literate?

Douglas Engelbart’s 1962 paper Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework is a seminal treatise on what computers should be for.