News avoidance has become more common and is associated with negative democratic outcomes. However, only a handful of studies have explored solutions to reduce news avoidance, with nudges offering a potential approach. One of such nudges are opting-in and opting-out effects. Additionally, news avoidance research suggests that one of the most promising—yet not fully tested—digital interventions is reminding citizens of their civic duty to keep informed. Importantly, citizenship norms also vary by country. To address these research gaps, a pre-registered online comparative experiment (2 × 2) was conducted in Austria (N = 403) and Slovakia (N = 401). Participants browsed a news website, choosing to select (opt-in) or deselect (opt-out) news for their digital newsfeed, with some receiving a civic duty nudge. When prompted to deselect, participants ended up with more news items, suggesting that news inclusion by default as part of the choice architecture setup of digital news platforms could reduce news avoidance as limited news consumption in the short term through increased news exposure. No significant effect of the civic duty nudge or a country difference was found, suggesting that such a norm is challenging to induce through prompts and is likely a more stable trait.
