Paper by Axel Bruns, Felix Münch, Ehsan Dehghan, and Laura Vodden, presented at the Future of Journalism conference, Cardiff, 15 Sep. 2023.

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News Sharing and Partisanship:
Tracking News Outlet Repertoires
on Twitter over Time
Axel Bruns¹, Felix Münch², Ehsan Dehghan¹, Laura Vodden¹
¹ Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane
² Leibniz-Institut für Medienforschung | Hans-Bredow-Institut / Forschungsinstitut Gesellschaftlicher Zusammenhalt, Hamburg
a.bruns@qut.edu.au | f.muench@leibniz-hbi.de | e.dehghan@qut.edu.au | laura.vodden@qut.edu.au

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Partisanship, Polarisation, and the News
• Polarisation:
• Concerns about rising polarisation around the world
• But what kind of polarisation – issue-based, ideological, affective, perceived, interpretive?
• Larger research projects: Laureate Fellowship* (Australia) / FGZ and SMO (Germany)
• Partisanship:
• Potentially expressed in media use: e.g. news usage and news sharing repertoires
• May indicate interpretive polarisation, in particular
• Dynamics over time, e.g. due to impact of COVID-19 or Russian war on Ukraine?
* Recruiting four new PhD students in 2024 – please get in touch (a.bruns@qut.edu.au)

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News Sharing and Polarisation
Faris, Robert, Hal Roberts, Bruce Etling, Nikki Bourassa, Ethan Zuckerman, and Yochai Benkler. 2017. “Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election.” Berkman Klein Center Research Publication 2017–6. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network. https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3019414.
• But:
• By clear partisans
• In the US

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News Repertoires over Time
• Datasets:
• Australian and German Twitter News Indices (ATNIX / DETNIX):
• Long-term datasets on sharing of domestic news sources on Twitter (⚰️)
• Focus here on activity from mid-2017 to end 2022
• ATNIX: top 10 news sources / DETNIX: top 30 news sources
• Both filtered for accounts sharing at least 20 links per domain per quarter-year
• And institutional accounts (e.g. of news outlets themselves) removed where possible
• Distinctions and assumptions:
• Original tweets: new tweets and replies crafted by the user that include news URLs
• Greater amount of cognitive labour, better indication of personal news repertoires
• Retweets: on-sharing of existing tweets by other accounts that include news URLs
• Lower amount of cognitive labour, more likely to include random news sources

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Overall Patterns

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• Overall patterns:
• Most accounts share only 1-2 unique sources per quarter
• Retweets generally more diverse than original tweets
• ATNIX retweets considerably more diverse than original tweets
• 80% of original ATNIX tweeters share just one unique source
• 49% of ATNIX retweeters share just one unique source
• DETNIX retweets slightly more diverse than original tweets
• 75% of original DETNIX tweeters share just one unique source
• 64% of DETNIX retweeters share just one unique source

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• Very stable patterns for original tweets:
• ATNIX tweeters consistently more likely to share one single source per quarter than DETNIX tweeters
• DETNIX tweeters consistently more likely to share 4+ sources per quarter than ATNIX tweeters

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• Temporarily diverging patterns for retweets:
• DETNIX retweeters become more singular in their sharing since 2018, and especially during 2020
• ATNIX retweeters are more diverse overall, become more singular in late 2022

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Accounts that shared only one
domain more than 20 times in a
given quarter.
Single-Domain Sharing

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• ABC News key source for single-source original sharers, …
• Conversation likely to be an outlier: much larger audience beyond Australia
• … and for single-source retweeters during/after pandemic, …
• … while Sydney Morning Herald declines as sole source
• Notable growth in Sky News Australia retweeting especially during pandemic

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• Deutsche Welle skews the data  removed
• foreign service not retweeted domestically

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• Unexplained decline of Focus amongst all single-domain sharers from 2021
• Welt strong with single-domain retweeters before and after COVID
• Stern strong during 2020

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Accounts that shared more than
one domain more than 20 times
in a given quarter.
Multi-Domain Sharing

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• ABC News clearly preferred by users who share two or more sources 20+ times per quarter
• Especially by retweeters of 2+ sources during bushfire crisis / pandemic
• Translation: for users who share more than one source 20+ times in one quarter, it’s
very likely that ABC News is part of their media repertoire
• Minor growth in original Sky News Australia co-sharing in 2020/2021
• Sydney Morning Herald also popular especially amongst multi-source retweeters

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• Very strange patterns for far-right Freie Welt co-sharing by original tweeters – domain name changes?
• Far more diverse set of frequently co-shared sources in Germany than in Australia:
• Bild (right-wing tabloid), Spiegel (left-leaning magazine), Focus (right-leaning magazine), FAZ (right-
leaning broadsheet)
• Bild most often co-shared by frequent retweeters of 2+ sources

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Domains that frequently appear
together in the media repertoires of
multi-domain sharers.
Domain Associations

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Normalised Closeness:
How closely connected to the overall network of domain
associations (for original tweets / for retweets) in each
quarter is each domain, compared to all other domains?
This is independent of the total volume of tweets.
1 = most close to all other domains
0 = least close to all other domains

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• ABC News and the Sydney Morning Herald clearly closest to all other domains
• Marked decline for Sydney Morning Herald from late 2019 onwards

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• Bundle of ~10 news outlets with similar closeness to rest of the domains
• Left-leaning Spiegel and (increasingly) right-wing Welt usually in the lead

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Domains that frequently appear
together in the media repertoires of
multi-domain sharers.
Domain Networks

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ATNIX: originals
2017-19 2020-22
Strong ABC/SMH axis
Axis declines, ABC more central

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ATNIX: retweets
2017-19 2020-22
Less notable decline of ABC/SMH axis

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DETNIX: originals
2017-19 2020-22
Fairly diverse and connected centre

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DETNIX: retweets
2017-19 2020-22
Distinct right-wing/populist subnetwork
Drifting further away from the centre

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Preliminary
Observations

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Partisanship in News Sharing?
• No evidence of substantial polarisation in either country
• Broadly mainstream outlets dominate strongly in Australia and Germany
• Australia: centrist public broadcaster ABC News, centre-right broadsheet SMH
• Germany: left-wing magazine Spiegel to right-wing tabloid Bild
• Retweeting patterns generally more diverse than original tweeting
• Dynamics over time:
• Australia: flight to the centre during COVID-19 pandemic – ABC News even more central
• Germany: growing diversification – mild split between centre-left and populist right emerging

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Further Plans
• Additional analysis:
• Full analysis of single- and multi-domain sharing patterns beyond top 10/30 domains
• Exploration of different activity thresholds (e.g. accounts with <20 shares per quarter)
• Deeper investigation of multi-domain sharing network metrics
• Manual and computational analysis of tweet texts and topics

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Inputs to this were supported by the ARC Laureate Fellowship project
Determining the Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online
Public Debate, ARC Future Fellowship project Understanding
Intermedia Information Flows in the Australian Online Public Sphere,
and the ARC LIEF project TrISMA: Tracking Infrastructure for Social
Media Analysis.
Acknowledgments