Commenting on UK News Organisations' Facebook Pages

The next speaker at ECREA 2014 is Iñaki Garcia-Blanco, whose focus is on discussing the news on social media, and specifically on Facebook. This is important given the perceived crisis of democracy, which requires greater levels of deliberation. Social media bring together access to the news and facilities for discussing it, and Facebook is increasingly important in this.

The research examined the news stories published by leading UK news sources on their official Facebook pages over the course of a single working week (some 1650 articles in total). Human interest and lifestyle stories were strongest in numbers, while commenting on international politics was disproportionately strong.

Of the political stories generating the most comments, international politics, war and conflict, domestic politics, human curiosity stories, and crime generated the greatest amount of commentary. Traditional understandings of politics dominated the sample, then, and news categories are not challenged.

Inflammatory remarks, analysis, policy discussion, and expressions of emotion constituted the most prevalent types of commentary. Such comments often overcome the understanding of politics as exclusively constituted of party politics, but there were very few invitations to action beyond commenting; also, people were more happy to commenting on real politics than making normative claims or referencing alternative systems.