For a long period of time, a number of political communication scholars to investigate specific individual attributes (e.g., political interest) that influence individual's pattern of exposure to conflicting political viewpoints. However, no research has been conducted on how individual's Internet usage may influence cross-cutting exposure, despite of growing trend of political information seeking on the Internet. Thus, this research investigated correlations between types of motivations for seeking political information online and people's cross-cutting exposure to conflicting political viewpoints. Respondents recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk (Mturk) were surveyed about their motivation for seeking political information online and their interpersonal discussion networks (N = 123). The results showed that party strength significantly moderated the relationship between entertainment motivation and cross-cutting exposure. Strong partisans were much less likely to be exposed to conflicting political viewpoints, while weak partisans show the opposite tendency. The limitations of the current motivation scale and refining the measurement of the scale were highlighted in the discussion for future research.
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