Are News Outlets Deliberately Trolling Us into More Engagement on Facebook?

The next speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is Eddy Hurcombe, whose focus is on the pursuit of social media interactions metrics by Australian news organisations that post deliberately controversial content – in essence, trolling for engagement. This taps into the social media logics that build on the platforms’ governing principles – and these social media logics now also increasingly govern the engagement with and dissemination of news stories.

This is not necessarily a purely Australian phenomenon – other news organisations also deliberately publish controversial content in order to pursue user engagement – we might need to rethink the focus on popularity in studies of social media and instead consider the social media logic of engagement.

Eddy’s own study examined the news outlets ABC News (public service media) and news.com.au (a right-of-centre commercial news platform). Eddy gathered such data over a month-long period in 2018. Provocative posts encountered during this time consistently received a substantial number of responses, and particularly provocative comments were often elevated to the top of the comment chain by Facebook’s algorithms.

The news organisations’ original posts sharing links to the stories often also framed them in a way that seemed to invite provocative responses, and this framing often also used ‘distancing’ or ‘scare’ quotes in order to portray the news organisation’s neutral stance towards the content of the stories.

These observations suggest that the affordances and logics of Facebook appear to encourage deliberately divisive practices: controversy rates with the platforms algorithms. Such provocative stories do not necessarily represent the majority of the content posted by these news outlets, but they are used regularly – and then often in a way that ostensibly signals journalistic balance and distance while inviting audience responses.

In this way, conventional journalistic tendencies towards sensationalism are transformed by the logics of participatory culture, and this can be understood as a way in which news outlets are trolling their audiences into becoming more responsive. There is a need to study such journalistic and editorial practices further; they are well understood for edgy and controversial outlets like Fox News, but appear to be considerably more widespread than that. In studying them, we must pay particular attention to the qualitative elements (word choices, image choices, framing, etc.) that such posts employ.