Does Sound Matter in News Videos on Social Media Platforms?

The third speaker in this session at ECREA 2024 is Margaux Guyot, whose interest is in the evolution of the dynamics between sound and text in social media news videos, examined here for the Wallonie and the French-speaking parts of Switzerland.

Indeed, is text overtaking sound in news videos? There are four ways of engaging with audiovisual content on smartphones: addressing others, serendipitous exposure to video, opportunistic search, and premeditated viewing, and these provide a framework for the analysis here; this paper focusses on videos posted by seven Walloon and Swiss news outlets in 2020 and 2023, and classified them for their use of text and sound, and the linkage between text and sound elements.

Text is omnipresent in social media video, and this even increased over time from 2020 to 2023 (from 97% to 100%); most videos can be watched perfectly well without sound (increasing from 85% to 88%). This is more common in Belgium (96%) than Switzerland (79%), though no obvious explanation for this can be found. Sound does add value to these videos, however, and this pattern also increases over time (from 47% to 57%). And platforms differ, too: YouTube (27%) and TikTok (44%) videos are much less likely to be able to be watched without sound.

This might reflect the more premeditated experience of watching videos on these platforms, as opposed to the more serendipitous video news exposure on other platforms. Soundless video consumption might thus be mostly limited to social media and non-videocentric platforms. These platforms’ affordances for switching on subtitles might also play a role here.