Future of Journalism 2023

News Sharing and Partisanship: Tracking News Outlet Repertoires on Twitter over Time

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

• 15 Sep. 2023 – Paper presented at the Future of Journalism 2023 conference, Cardiff

Presentation Slides

Abstract

There are substantial concerns that democratic societies are becoming more polarised: recent surveys in Germany and Australia, for example, have found that self-reported and perceived polarisation are both on the rise (Roose, 2021; Cameron & McAllister, 2019). This paper complements such survey evidence by investigating the impact that such growing polarisation may have on everyday patterns of news engagement, and in particular, on news sharing via social media.

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 greater communicative engagement than the mere act of reading or watching a news item (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.

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. Surprisingly, early results of this analysis show that heavy sharers of mainstream news content appear to have a less diverse news repertoire than those who frequently share highly partisan outlets: the latter often also share mainstream news, but along with critical rather than supportive commentary.

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