This study explores how digital news use among young Europeans links to radical belief dispositions, particularly within gaming platforms and messengers, where socio‐affective dynamics shape engagement with political information. We argue that online groups are an overlooked locus for biased information processing and the normalization of extremist worldviews. The conflation of an increasingly fragmented online news space with the inherently politicized gaming cosmos can relate to amplified problematic worldviews based on shared activity, identity, and reality. Based on a cross‐country survey ( N = 1489; eight European countries), we compare (the use of) gaming, messenger apps, social media, and traditional media for news in terms of how they afford problematic forms of collectivity, particularly in relation to social, cynical, and radical epistemologies. We find a robust correlation between news use and a set of radical belief dispositions, prominently with messenger apps, but even more so in gaming‐related online environments—less so on social media and none with traditional news use. Notably, a mediation analysis suggests that shared meaning‐making exhibits a negative rather than a positive indirect association with radical belief dispositions. We discuss the complex interplay of how individual factors and platform architectures connect with news engagement utilizing a vulnerability‐affordance framework.
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Greipl et al. (2026) studied this question.
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