What News Outlets Benefit the Most from Social Media Logics?

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Tian Yang, presenting a comparison of the visibility of news on the Web, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Platforms are now central to the presentation of news production, dissemination, and use, and access through social media is considerably more common than direct access to Websites.

But the social media ecosystem does not replicate the web ecosystem, and some news outlets are making better use of those ecosystems to attract audiences than others. Users’ choices of platforms, and news outlets’ choices in engaging with platforms, both affect the formation of platform used audiences for the news.

As a result of such choices, then, it is variously possible that legacy media gain less visibility on social media, because of their continued favouring of conventional Web platforms (an institutional legacy logic); that unreliable sources gain more visibility on social media, because of the greater tolerance of social media audiences for such sources (an information reliability logic); that hyperpartisan – and especially right-wing hyperpartisan – media outlets gain more visibility on social media, because of the greater presence of hyperpartisans on social media (a media partisanship logic); or that news outlets catering to low-brow, mass audiences, younger audiences, and/or more female audiences gain more visibility on social media, because of the demographics of social media platforms (a news inequalities logic). These logics may play out differently on different platforms, too.

From February to July 2022, the study identified 766 US-based news outlets and assessed their relative visibility by calculating the difference between social media engagement (on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube) and Web traffic measures. Legacy media, especially newspapers, showed less engagement across all social media platforms; unreliable media were more prominent only on Twitter; hyperpartisan media thrived, but there was no asymmetry between the left and the right; mass-oriented media gained more engagement, as did media oriented towards older audiences on Facebook, but female-oriented media lost out on Twitter.

This presents a mixed picture, then. Digital-born, unreliable, partisan, and mass-oriented media all gained advantages from using social media, but sometimes only on specific platforms.