Skewed Patterns of News Posting and Engagement on Instagram

The post-lunch session at IAMCR 2023 starts with Julian Maitra, whose focus is on news on Instagram. He begins by noting several media trends that affect digital journalism and news: increasing news consumption via social media; platformisation and atomisation of the news; personalisation of news; incidental or serendipitous encounters with the news; the social dissemination of news; the fragmentation of audiences; algorithmic gatekeeping; and the weakening of conventional news gatekeeping. The net effect is potentially the end of the mass audience for the news.

The present project, then, explored the Instagram pages of some 662 global news publishers from 50 countries and in 49 languages; it used CrowdTangle to gather account-level metadata, with particular focus on their post publication frequencies and their user engagement metrics, from August 2021 to July 2022. This produced some 1.8 million posts with 12 billion likes, 400 million (or 3%) comments, 35 billion video views (possibly inflated by Instagram’s video autoplay mode), and an increase of 90 million followers of these accounts over the year of the study.

All of the most active news publishers on Instagram were from the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. Engagement was predominantly with Farsi, Spanish, Hindi, and Arabic outlets; the first European outlet was the German Tagesschau in sixth place (304 million interactions, just ahead of Fox News with 258 million). Top posts, however, included New York Times posts about the 9/11 anniversary, the Roe vs. Wade decision, as well as other outlets’ posts about killings in India, the war in Ukraine, the death of an Iranian access, and a human-interest story in Portuguese.

There is a very strong skew in interaction patterns: there is a small group of very active publishers, but the majority are considerably less active; and an even smaller amount of publishers with very high levels of interaction, compared to the vast majority with very limited interactions. This points to a pronounced Pareto effect for Instagram news: 37% of news publishers contribute 80% of the content, and 11% of publishers receive 80% of audience engagement. Meanwhile, 0.2% of individual posts received 6% of of user engagement. This points to the continued existence of a kind of ‘social mass media’, or a mass audience for news on social media.