Studying Cross-Platform Alternative News Sharing Practices

The Monday morning session at the ICA 2024 conference begins with Jakob Bæk Kristensen, presenting a study on cross-platform alternative news sharing. Cross-platform studies are highly necessary, but still remain rare: even if many platforms are designed to keep users on-platform, users themselves often act and share content across platforms – but it is difficult to trace those practices across multiple platforms. To do so, however, also would enable us to better understand the cross-platform network of single-platform publics, and thereby the broader media ecosystem.

Information sharing ecosystems can be defined in various ways; here, they are defined by a set of alternative media sources that are shared across a variety of platforms. The project gathered all alternative news media accounts that had shared links to alternative news articles, and then identified all other accounts that had shared the same URLs, and finally gathered all other URLs those accounts had shared. Across nine platforms, this resulted in a dataset of some 900m posts that shared alternative news media URLs from the Nordic countries over the duration of the study.

34% of all URLs appeared on multiple platforms; 16.5% did so with the same texts surrounding the URLs. Looking at URLs over their time of posting, links first posted on YouTube (90%), Instagram (51%), and Gab (21%) were most likely to be shared on other platforms, too; Facebook (17%) and Telegram (12%) had the highest probability of links from other platforms appearing there too. YouTube links particularly flow to Telegram (71%) and Instagram (42%), for instance; this is unsurprising for a platform like YouTube that is designed to have its content shared, of course, but the primary destinations are still notable. Such specialised platforms are more likely to deliver link outflow, while Facebook, Telegram, and Twitter are spaces for link inflow.

It is also possible to use this to examine the network structures of content flows across platforms; 16%-24% of clusters in this network focus are made up of links circulating on only one platform, while 20%-14% are present on four or more platforms. Much of the content circulates even with the same textual content surrounding those links – the networks are very similar. Clearly there are groups of actors here that operate across multiple platforms.