The News Sharing Gap: Divergence in Online Political News Publication and Dissemination Patterns across Elections and Countries

Abstract

Are journalists and Facebook users equally interested in political news? Introducing the conceptualization and measurement of the “news sharing gap”, this study compares the sharing of political news by Facebook users to the production of political news by news media organizations. To paint a broad picture of these differences, we compare the news sharing gap (a) across election and routine periods and (b) across eight countries: Australia, Austria, Brazil, Germany, the Netherlands, Romania, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Analyzing 265,714 articles shared over 12 million times on Facebook, findings show that elections are broadly linked to increases in political news publication, but even larger increases in political news sharing. The study reveals how, overall, political news is shared more often than news publication patterns would suggest, proposing higher political interest by Facebook users than previously thought. In most cases, political news sharing far outpaces political news production in the form of a “negative” news sharing gap, with the relative demand for political news (in the form of news sharing) being higher than the supply. Lastly, building upon previous work, we propose and validate a distant supervised machine learning method for multilingual, large-scale identification of political news across distinct languages, contexts and time periods.