Facebook, news media and platform dependency: The institutional impacts of news distribution on social platforms

Abstract

There is a growing concern around the dependency of news organisations on platforms like Facebook for audience traffic. However, scholars are still working out the extent of this dependency and how it manifests in practice. In this article, we draw on interviews with Australian news professionals and industry fieldwork to provide a nuanced account of this phenomenon. We find that news media organisations have recently started to diversify their distribution strategies and the business models associated with them in response to Facebook’s algorithm changes. While Facebook remains important, we suggest that greater attention needs to be paid to the complex relationships that news organisations have with platforms. This article ends by considering the implications of these findings for international policy discussions centred around the prospect of platform regulation.

Clickbait news and algorithmic curation: A game theory framework of the relation between journalism, users, and platforms

“…That is, the news outlets' clickbait supply deviated from each other, which indicates a replacement of stigmergic orientation with opportunistic behavior. This result complements the findings of Meese and Hurcombe (2020) and Cornia et al (2018), who show that algorithm changes induced outlets to turn away from Facebook as a central distributer. Thus, algorithm changes may have unintended consequences leading to a decrease of news homogeneity online.…”

The Institutional Impacts of Algorithmic Distribution: Facebook and the Australian News Media

“…While Facebook is clearly a dominant social platform and is worth studying considering an increasingly tense policy debate (Flew & Wilding, 2021), most Australian news media outlets were not wholly reliant on the platform for audience traffic in 2018. Some of the public statements made by Australian media companies, our own qualitative research (Meese & Hurcombe, 2020), and outcomes from the Facebook ban suggest that this is still the case for many outlets. Of course, Facebook referral traffic is still valuable for news outlets who want as many people viewing their content as possible, but these numbers suggest that most outlets across the country are not in a state of complete dependence.…”

“…The other important factor to note is that various issues related to algorithmic distribution have been canvassed through the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission's (ACCC) Digital Platforms Inquiry. It has sparked a prominent debate across media and technology sectors in Australia; so, these data have been collected during a particularly sensitive time, when publishers have been particularly introspective about their use of social media (Meese & Hurcombe, 2020). The ACCC released a final report featuring analyses based on confidential data from media companies and social media platforms.…”

“…The first is social news, which went from dizzying heights across 2014 and 2015 across reactions, comments, and shares to eventually collapse below our benchmark from the early 2017 period onwards. Conversely, public service media outlets were more resilient, seeing comments, reactions, and shares rise well after the supposedly best years for news on social media (Meese & Hurcombe, 2020). There are a number of reasons for these trends, and we will go on to discuss some of these factors in our final analysis.…”

Journalism Policy across the Commonwealth: Partial Answers to Public Problems

“…This is better than the current situation, where platforms independently decide how and when to fund journalism projects through independent grants and secure licencing agreements with selected publishers (Porter 2020). Bargaining codes, like the one proposed in Australia, do provide some transparency to an otherwise captive and unequal negotiation process (Meese and Hurcombe 2020). However, these mechanisms also make platforms more or less responsible for the market failure of news.…”