Source and Engagement Diversity for Australian News on Facebook

The final day at thre AANZCA 2024 conference starts with a session on online news consumption, and the first speaker is Cameron McTernan, whose interest is in source and exposure diversity on Facebook. Facebook remains the most popular social media platform in Australia, but the future of news on the platform is in some doubt, given the impact of the News Media Bargaining Code and Meta’s intention to downrank or even remove news from its platforms.

This materially affects news outlets, as it also reduces traffic to their sites; but another key question here is how it impacts on the diversity of news that social media audiences encounter and engage with. Generally, users who access news through social media have more diverse news diets – but there is limited research that has explored this for Facebook to date, especially also specifically in Australia.

Cameron has examined this both in terms of source diversity (who is producing news on the platform) and exposure diversity (how such news is being engaged with). This builds on PIJI’s newsroom database, which was used to find some 656 active Facebook pages of Australian news outlets; Facebook activity and engagement data for these pages was then gathered via the now defunct CrowdTangle.

Local NewsCorp, Rural Press, ABC, and Seven West pages were most numerous in this dataset, largely simply because of their many local newsrooms these organisations operate; the number of these pages lines up broadly with the relative population of the states and territories these newsrooms operate in. Much of the content shared here is digital or print-based with rather less TV content and virtually no radio content being posted.

ABC newsrooms were amongst the first adopters of Facebook, and this was rewarded with considerable engagement – this is sustained only for the main ABC News page, however. By 2015, the commercial players (7 News, News.com.au, and others) had grown to be more prominent, and there was considerable fluctuation in audience engagement, showing substantial dynamism in the Facebook news market.

Such dynamism masks a considerable level of concentration, though – the top four players account for a considerable amount of total engagement. There remains room for new entrants, however, as the success of new outlets like Daily Mail Australia and Sky News Australia has shown.