News Exposure and Avoidance Tactics on Social Media

The next session at ECREA 2018 is one that I have a paper in as well – but we start with Marcel Broersma. He begins by asking whether journalism is truly at home in social media: do its strategies align with user tactics in these platforms, and are the platforms being colonised by news organisations? How are publics for journalism constructed on these platforms, and do users have any interest in being interpellated as publics here?

Audiences may consider social media as spaces to connect for interpersonal communication; in that case, social media predominantly have a social function. There could also be a more utilitarian, informational function – for journalistic news, but perhaps also for other forms of information. Finally, social media could also be understood by audiences as spaces to avoid certain content and experiences – and the push of news into users’ feeds would then be unwelcome, and would require tactics of exposure avoidance.

To understand this, we also need to consider the idea of a public. Publics are constructed discursively; they exist because people are addressed in a certain way, and represent a form of imagined community. These may be structured around specific commonalities between their members; news and journalism may be part of the process of constructing publics on social media, but perhaps only a minor element in the construction of publics – agency for constructing publics may have shifted from news media to news users, too.

News organisations address users on social media in particular ways, in hope of constructing particular, more or less coherent publics, but users themselves also do so of their own accord, and through different dynamics. News outlets are interested in this because they want to know what users they are addressing (not least for purposes of editorial selection and advertising). Where is journalism situated in this contextual relationship between news media and publics, then?

Social media have invested heavily in getting journalists and news organisations on board with their platforms; they saw this as a driver for user take-up of their platforms. Similarly, in their current precarious economic situation news outlets have also seen social media as an opportunity to attract new readers and viewers, and thereby construct new publics for their content. But users have also developed their own tactics for avoiding news and journalism on social media: this is especially if they consider social media as predominantly social spaces, rather than as sources of news.

This is also a question of trust: if users are concerned about the reliability of social media as news sources, and about the trustworthiness of content they encounter through their (algorithmically curated) timelines, they may be more likely to avoid news via social media altogether. Further, if users treat social media as recreational spaces, they may not be interested in having that experience interrupted by news items. Such behaviours may require a rethinking of our understanding of social media as spaces for the news – but this may also show different dynamics on different social media platforms: Twitter, for instances, continues to be considerably more associated with news exposure than other social media platforms. By contrast Facebook has recently deprioritised news stories in its algorithmically curated newsfeed.

Research on this will need not to start with journalism itself, but instead focus on the users of news, and ask them what kind of information they expect to see on social media, when, and in what contexts. This also has implications for the normative foundations of journalism, and for our conceptualisation of publics. All the same, social media continue to be prominent in people’s everyday lives, and this must also be recognised.