ANZCA 2021

The Conversation, Ten Years On: Patterns of Engagement with The Conversation Australia and Canada

Axel Bruns, Michelle Riedlinger, and Jean Burgess

• 8 July 2021 – paper presented at the Australia New Zealand Communication Association conference, online

Founded in Australia in 2011, The Conversation is a globally unique initiative to communicate scholarly research and insights to the general public, by pairing academic experts with journalistic editors to produce quality scholarly news coverage of current events; it now operates national and regional editions in five continents. But levels of trust in experts and researchers are unevenly distributed across different demographics, and may affect public engagement with and social on-sharing of Conversation content. This study examines how engagement on the leading social media platform Facebook with The Conversation aligns with engagement with other mainstream media outlets, and thus by proxy also with the respective political leanings that such outlets represent. This provides new insights into whether The Conversation is able to address a bipartisan, general audience, or whether engagement with scientific insight is unevenly distributed across ideological and other divides.

We examine this for the oldest and youngest national editions of The Conversation. First, we draw on Facebook's data access portal CrowdTangle to identify the Australian and Canadian Facebook pages and groups that have most actively shared links to prominent mainstream news outlets in their country. Using existing scholarly assessments of these outlets' positioning on their country's political spectrum, we use these data to infer a political positioning for the Facebook groups and pages sharing these links. Finally, we examine the extent to which these pages and groups also share content from The Conversation, and from this develop a picture of the relative likelihood that pages and groups representing specific political positions will engage with content from The Conversation. In aggregate, these patterns thus provide a critical reality check on the success of The Conversation in its mission to reach a broad general public, and indicate where further efforts are required to reach additional demographics.

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