ECREA 2022

News-Sharing Practices over Time: Is There an Impact from Growing Polarisation?

Axel Bruns, Ehsan Dehghan, Felix Münch, and Laura Vodden

• 21 Oct. 2022 – Paper presented at the ECREA 2022 conference, Aarhus

Presentation Slides

Abstract

There are substantial concerns that democratic societies are becoming more polarised; a recent survey-based study found, for example, that political polarisation in Germany had increased over the longer term; the self-reported positioning of citizens on a scale from left to right shows a growing division between the left and the right (Roose, 2021). A similar survey in Australia found that voters have also regarded the positions of the major parties as drifting in opposite directions for more than a decade (Cameron & McAllister, 2019).

This paper complements this evidence from representative surveys by investigating the impact that such growing polarisation may have on everyday patterns of news engagement. If political and ideological divisions in society are indeed increasing, then we expect this to manifest also in the news consumed by domestic audiences, and – more explicitly – in the news items that members of those audiences choose to share with their social media followers. We focus on this latter, active and deliberate form of news engagement via news sharing, as the additional effort required to craft a social media post that includes the URL of a news article, usually along with a brief comment on its contents, implies significantly greater communicative engagement than the act of reading or watching a news item in itself (Bruns, 2018). We further distinguish this active news sharing, where users initiate the process by creating a new post, from the less demanding practice of news on-sharing, where they merely repost (e.g. retweet) another user’s post sharing an article link.

Using two large longitudinal datasets of all posts on Twitter that linked to any major German and Australian news sites, covering the period of 2016 to 2021, we identify all accounts that either shared such links in original, new tweets (news sharing), or retweeted existing tweets containing such links (news on-sharing). After removing low-activity and institutional accounts (e.g. those of the news outlets themselves), for user accounts in both groups we determine their news outlet repertoire: the range of outlets whose content they are willing to share.

Our analysis then systematically compares those repertoires for similar periods in each year, to determine how news-sharing practices have evolved over this timeframe. In particular, drawing on existing data on the relative positioning of outlets on the political spectrum in each country (e.g. Park et al., 2021), we investigate whether the repertoires of different partisan groups are becoming more ideologically distinct over time, and whether this is true both for active news sharing and more casual news on-sharing. We conclude by reviewing these results and highlighting further research opportunities.

References

Bruns, A. (2018). Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere. Peter Lang.

Cameron, S., & McAllister, I. (2019). Trends in Australian Political Opinion: Results from the Australian Election Study 1987–2019. Australian National University. https://australianelectionstudy.org/wp-content/uploads/Trends-in-Australian-Political-Opinion-1987-2019.pdf

Park, S., Fisher, C., McGuinness, K., Lee, J. Y., & McCallum, K. (2021). Digital News Report: Australia 2021. News and Media Research Centre. https://doi.org/10.25916/KYGY-S066

Roose, J. (2021). Politische Polarisierung in Deutschland. Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung. https://www.kas.de/de/einzeltitel/-/content/politische-polarisierung-in-deutschland