de León, Ernesto; Vermeer, Susan; Damian, Trilling (2021). Electoral news sharing: a study of changes in news coverage and Facebook sharing behaviour during the 2018 Mexican elections. Information, communication & society, 26(6), pp. 1193-1209. Taylor & Francis 10.1080/1369118X.2021.1994629
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Patterns of news consumption are changing drastically. Citizens increasingly rely on social media such as Facebook to read and share political news. With the power of these platforms to expose citizens to political information, the implications for democracy are profound, making understanding what is shared during elections a priority on the research agenda. Nevertheless, to the best of our knowledge, no study has yet explicitly explored how elections transform news sharing behaviour on Facebook. This study begins to remedy this by (a) investigating changes in news coverage and news sharing behaviour on Facebook by comparing election and routine periods, and by (b) addressing the ‘news gap’ between preferences of journalists and news consumers on social media. Employing a novel data set of news articles (N = 83,054) in Mexico, findings show that during periods of heightened political activity, both the publication and dissemination of political news increases, the gap between the news choices of journalists and consumers narrows, and that news sharing resembles a zero-sum game, with increased political news sharing leading to a decrease in the sharing of other news.
Item Type: |
Journal Article (Original Article) |
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Division/Institute: |
03 Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Institute of Communication and Media Studies (ICMB) |
UniBE Contributor: |
de León Williams, Ernesto Emiliano |
Subjects: |
300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology 300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology > 320 Political science |
ISSN: |
1369-118X |
Publisher: |
Taylor & Francis |
Language: |
English |
Submitter: |
Ernesto de León |
Date Deposited: |
29 Mar 2022 16:35 |
Last Modified: |
09 May 2024 16:48 |
Publisher DOI: |
10.1080/1369118X.2021.1994629 |
BORIS DOI: |
10.48350/166855 |
URI: |
https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/166855 |
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