The document examines news-sharing practices on social media in Australia over time, focusing on the impacts of political polarization. It analyzes data from the Australian Twitter News Index and identifies trends in which news domains are shared, revealing a consistent preference for certain domains like abc.net.au. The findings indicate mixed evidence of polarization, with some users showing loyalty to specific news sources while others share across multiple outlets, raising questions about the implications for public discourse.

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News-Sharing Practices over Time:
Is There an Impact from Growing
Polarisation?
Axel Bruns¹², Ehsan Dehghan¹, Felix Münch³, Laura Vodden¹
¹: Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane
²: Institut für Kommunikationswissenschaft und Medienforschung, Universität Zürich
³: Leibniz-Institut für Medienforschung │ Hans-Bredow-Institut, Hamburg
a.bruns@qut.edu.au, e.dehghan@qut.edu.au, f.muench@leibniz-hbi.de, laura.vodden@qut.edu.au

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https://research.qut.edu.au/dmrc/
@qutdmrc

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News-Sharing as a Habitual Practice
‘participation comes more through sharing than through contributing news themselves’
— Purcell et al.
‘the use of news sharing for the purposes of both criticism and “collaborative verification”’
— Newman et al.
‘gathering public affairs content from an ever-expanding array of content providers
and delivery platforms and at all times of day’ — Thorson & Wells
‘those who are incidentally exposed to news on social media use more
different sources of online news than non-users’ — Fletcher & Nielsen
‘sharing on Facebook centers more around few dominant issues,
whereas on Twitter there is more variation’ — Trilling et al.
‘social network site users select “markers of cool” based on an imagined audience of
friends and peers’ — Marwick and boyd

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(Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism: Digital News Report 2016)

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Project

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But: Who Shares What?
• Proactive vs. reactive news-sharing:
• Self-initiated sharing (original posts) display – and perform – personal media preferences
• Reactive on-sharing (retweets and equivalents) reflect personal networks’ preferences
• Evolution of sharing practices affected by:
• Intrinsic developments – e.g. changing personal views, shifting ideological positioning
• Extrinsic developments – e.g. crisis events
• Polarisation?
• Any clear distinctions between different news selection patterns?
• Any changes to such patterns over time?

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Datasets
• Australian Twitter News Index (ATNIX) / German Twitter News Index (DETNIX):
• All tweets since 2012 (AU) / 2016 (DE) that contained links to one of 39 (AU) / 343 (DE) news domains
– excluding homepage links and non-news content
• Live ATNIX dashboard at https://bit.ly/_ATNIX_; 3x daily updates by @_ATNIX_ account
• Data selection:
• June* 2017, April 2018, April 2019, April 2020, April 2021, April 2022
• *: April 2017 not yet converted to required format
• Ten most shared news domains overall
• Accounts that shared at least 15 news links during the month, excluding official accounts and
@_ATNIX_ account itself
• Work in progress: only ATNIX results to date, only self-initiated (original) sharing to date

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Results

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Analysis
• Ten most shared Australian news domains:
*: conversation.com used by multiple international Conversation editions; divergent patterns expected
Domain
Original Tweets
(April 2021) Outlet Type
abc.net.au 73,896 public service media
theconversation.com 48,412 science media site*
smh.com.au 29,509 broadsheet newspaper
news.com.au 15,377 all-purpose news
thenewdaily.com.au 14,757 left-of-centre political
theage.com.au 10,627 broadsheet newspaper
sbs.com.au 9,195 public service media
afr.com 8,500 financial newspaper
9news.com.au 7,742 TV news bulletin
skynews.com.au 4,281 hard-right TV channel

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Network Analysis
• Network construction:
• Same account shares news from two different domains in same month  link between the domains
• Of all accounts that share domain A, 20% share only domain A  AA self-link weight is 20
• Of all accounts that share domain A, 10% also share domain B  AB link weight is 10
• Of all accounts that share domain A, 30% also share domain C  AC link weight is 30
• …
• Directed network: AB link weight ≠ BA link weight
• (to do: additional weighting of domain-to-domain links by volume of tweets)

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June 2017
most sharers also share abc.net.au
skynews.com.au sharers also share
many other mainstream domains

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April 2018
most sharers also share
abc.net.au and smh.com.au
skynews.com.au sharers
far less active

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April 2019
most sharers also share
abc.net.au and smh.com.au

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April 2020
abc.net.au even more central
skynews.com.au sharers
focus mainly on abc.net.au

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April 2021
skynews.com.au sharers focus
on abc.net.au and news.com.au
abc.net.au remains central

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April 2022
(election campaign)
abc.net.au remains central
skynews.com.au sharers focus
on abc.net.au and news.com.au

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June 2017
Large group share only abc.net.au
Sharers of skynews.com.au also share many others
Sharers of other domains also share abc.net.au And smh.com.au

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April 2018
Sharers of skynews.com.au now more exclusive
Almost nobody shares skynews.com.au as a secondary domain

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April 2019

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April 2020
Sharers of skynews.com.au focus more on abc.net.au
Sharing of smh.com.au as secondary domain declines

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April 2021
abc.net.au as the secondary domain

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April 2022
Sharers of skynews.com.au broaden their focus again

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Observations

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Notable Patterns
• Loyalty:
• Many active sharers focus predominantly on one domain
• Especially abc.net.au (major public broadcaster) and theconversation.com (strong international userbase)
• Leading domains:
• abc.net.au is the preferred secondary domain being shared (especially 2021/22 – COVID-19, election?)
• In earlier years also smh.com.au, but this declines from 2019 (Nine/Fairfax merger, or COVID-19?)
• skynews.com.au sharers often most likely to also share other domains (especially 2017 / 2021-22)
• Secondary sharing may be to criticise other news sources (especially abc.net.au) – yet to be explored
• Other sharers often least likely to also share skynews.com.au, especially since 2018
• Possible indication of substantial concerns about skynews.com.au’s (increasingly?) problematic content

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Further Outlook
• Polarisation (in patterns of attention and sharing)?
• Not obviously – abc.net.au as central source of information for all multi-domain sharers
• But: strong contingent of single-domain sharers  not suitable as indicators of polarisation
• Additional analysis of retweeting patterns may round out the picture
• Polarisation (in ideological perspectives of sharers)?
• Need to further investigate how links are shared – to endorse or criticise
• Strong suspicion that skynews.com.au sharers share secondary domains to criticise
• Is this unique to Australia and its extremely concentrated media system?
• Need to replicate this for news-sharing patterns in Germany and elsewhere
• Also need to introduce further weighting for comparative sharing volume (tweets per user per domain)
• Selection of one month per year may further skew study results

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This research was supported by the ARC Laureate Fellowship project Dynamics of Partisanship and
Polarisation in Online Public Debate and the ARC Future Fellowship project Understanding
Intermedia Information Flows in the Australian Online Public Sphere, and by the Research Institute
Social Cohesion, sponsored by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.
Axel Bruns is currently a guest professor at the Institut für Kommunikationswissenschaft und
Medienforschung, Universität Zürich.
Acknowledgments