This article explores the influence of social media giant Facebook on the journalistic field by examining how news organizations responded to Facebook's algorithm tweak, announced in June 2014, that prioritized videos directly uploaded to the social media platform. In announcing the tweak, Facebook, an agent external to the journalistic field, did not just change its own internal rules but also imposed them on users, including news organizations traditionally governed by the journalistic field's own set of rules. Based on large-scale posting activity data collected from 232 Facebook Pages operated by major news organizations in the United States, this study found that most news organizations complied with Facebook's updated rules on Native Videos by significantly increasing their social video production, opening up the journalistic field to the influence of an agent external to journalism. But while digital-native and broadcast news publishers were more responsive in adapting to the tweak, print brands were slower to respond.
Audience measurement refers to the goal‐oriented process of collecting, analyzing, reporting, and interpreting data about the size, composition, behavior, characteristics, and preferences of individuals interacting with particular media brands or products. Traditional tools include focus group interviews, circulation audits, media diaries, surveys, and people meters. These were usually conducted by ratings or audit firms. But the rise of digital journalism also led to new tools, such as web and social media analytics, conducted by news organizations themselves or by third‐party applications, such as Facebook. Unlike traditional tools, analytics are (a) faster to collect; (b) automatic, as both deliberate and incidental feedback are recorded; (c) more inclusive, as data come from a much larger number of the audience; and (d) more comprehensive. Thus, audience measurement has evolved from a state when data points were few and collection was expensive to a situation of abundant data and low‐cost analytics, presenting new challenges.
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This descriptive study investigates political mobilization and user engagement patterns on Facebook and associated partisan and gender discrepancies. It focuses on Switzerland, where political actors frequently seek to mobilize and shape citizens’ opinions before direct-democratic voting on wide-ranging policy issues. Using digital trace data from CrowdTangle, the analysis focuses on the posting frequency and received user interactions of 770 Swiss political actors’ Facebook pages. The analysis period covers 20 months, from November 2019 to July 2021, during which five popular votes occurred, and the sampled FB pages published more than 226,000 posts and received more than 18,000,000 user interactions. A descriptive quantitative analysis and a multiple regression analysis revealed an overall skewed pattern: Mobilization and user engagement are driven by small subsets of highly active and interacted-with FB pages. A few FB pages of the right-wing Swiss People’s Party and male politicians receive highly disproportionate user engagement – relative to more centrist parties and female politicians – but also relative to their electoral share in the national parliament. The results show that only a few dominant political voices are widely heard on Facebook, even if many speak. These insights are of interest beyond Switzerland, as Facebook and other social media platforms shape political discourse across liberal democracies.
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