Newssharing on Facebook by Australian Politicians

The final speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is Cameron McTernan, whose interest is in the sharing of Australian news on Facebook, especially by politicians. This can be understood through the lens of agenda-setting theory: news media content plays a crucial role in shaping what public issues audiences learn about, and politicians’ sharing of news media content seeks to channel and affect these processes. (There are also questions about the extent of such agenda-setting power.)

Cameron’s work focusses on Facebook, which remains a major and influential social media platform in Australia, with the vast majority of federal politicians active on the platform. The study explores how these politicians share news on Facebook, and what these patterns might reveal about their agenda-setting efforts. He collected all current federal politicians’ Facebook posts from 2010 to 2024 and correlated them with their party and electorate affiliations.

Labor and Coalition accounts were most active on the platform, in total numbers, but the Greens and Katter Party shared a considerably greater amount of news content as part of their posts than the other parties. Newssharing is also unevenly distributed across politicians: some of them are especially active in sharing news, with Greens leader Adam Bandt alone accounting for some 9% of all shared news articles. Key outlets shared include ABC News, The Guardian, and the Sydney Morning Herald, but these are also unevenly distributed across different parties, unsurprisingly. (Coalition accounts share far more NewsCorp outlets, although the paywalling of some such content generally depresses its sharing numbers.) Also unsurprisingly, Labor and Greens politicians often shared the same news stories; Coalition and Labor politicians rarely shared the same stories.

The next step in this work, then, is topic modelling, to explore exactly what stories and topics are most prominent for each politician and party group.