Replication Data for: Beyond Surveys: Leveraging Real-World Events to Validate Behavioral Measures of News Exposure

Do people learn about the political world through online media? We address this question by developing different exogenous measures of media exposure, drawing on three months of web-tracking data from five democracies. Our analysis distinguishes between visits to general news domains and visits to politically or content-specific articles, identified using machine learning techniques. We evaluate these measures through multiple approaches, including their ability to significantly predict political knowledge. To deepen our understanding, we analyze knowledge gains during a major, unexpected news event—the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine—using observed media exposure measures varying in granularity. Our findings underscore the importance of granularity: visits and time spent on Ukraine-related articles emerge as the only significant predictor of surveillance knowledge, while broader measures, such as domain-level visits, show no significant impact when controlling for self-reported exposure and other key predictors. We conclude by discussing the substantive and methodological implications of these results.