  This paper examines news consumption in response to a major polarizing event,
and we use the May 2021 Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an example. We conduct
a detailed analysis of the news consumption of more than eight thousand Twitter
users who are either pro-Palestinian or pro-Israeli and authored more than 29
million tweets between January 1 and August 17, 2021. We identified the stance
of users using unsupervised stance detection. We observe that users may consume
more topically-related content from foreign and less popular sources, because,
unlike popular sources, they may reaffirm their views, offer more extreme,
hyper-partisan, or sensational content, or provide more in depth coverage of
the event. The sudden popularity of such sources may not translate to
longer-term or general popularity on other topics.
