Measuring News Diversity on Facebook in Australia

The next speaker in this ANZCA 2023 session is Cameron McTernan, who is interested in news diversity on social media. Media diversity has long been an issue and a priority in media policy, but has often focussed on media ownership and media content at the outlet level, without necessarily taking into account the role of social media in the distribution of content. This is becoming increasingly important because media supply chains are becoming less linear as social media logics and algorithms affect news distribution.

There is a distinction arising between direct access (through the original sources) and distributed access (as facilitated by search engines and social media platforms), then. Users of the latter tend to have broader and more diverse content diets than those who access news sources directly, yet how such intermediaries affect news diets and what content they promote needs to be researched further.

How might we conceptualise the supply chain for media diversity at the distributed access level, then? In addition to conventional and fairly linear models of source diversity (at the media ownership and workforce level), content diversity (in formats, actor demographics, and represented ideas and viewpoints), and exposure diversity (both horizontal and vertical) as they might apply to direct access media, there is also a need now to consider the multi- or non-linear flows of distributed access, as they are facilitated by digital intermediaries. This produces a multiplex diversity model that integrates direct and distributed access to news media content, and can examine current patterns and trends in media consumption in Australia and beyond.

Cameron’s current study explores this for Facebook, using the CrowdTangle data access service. This also finds a substantial growth in news pages from Australia around 2009, as well as a considerable transformation of the Facebook news market in later years (with Seven News especially adopting Facebook as a key platform for news distribution), but also divergent patterns of news engagement that do not necessarily follow and reflect the volume of posting activity. This can also be expressed in terms of market concentration, using the HHI, CR4, and CR8 indices, which indicate a long-term decline in news market concentration on the Australian Facebook.