Transnational News Sharing on Social Media: Measuring and Analysing Twitter News Media Repertoires of Domestic and Foreign Audience Communities

Abstract

In digitized media environments, users can access news from all over the world. The internationalization of news consumption is intensified by social media like Twitter, as users share news from different countries. In our study, we combine the two strands of research about media repertoires as well as transnational news consumption. Switzerland is a compelling case with regard to transnational news consumption as media outlets in the three official languages, German, French, and Italian can reach audiences in the larger neighbouring countries of Germany, France, and Italy. To investigate transnational news consumption, we tracked URL shares of Swiss online news media websites for two months on Twitter. We then combined this data with the users’ followee structures in the Twitter network (n = 355,197 tweets, n = 64,170 unique users) and inductively detected domestic and foreign audience communities with social network analysis. Thus, we were able to identify and compare the Twitter news media repertoires of domestic and foreign audience communities. Regarding transnational usage patterns, we show that especially quality media brands continuously reach audience communities in neighbouring countries.

Keywords:

• Media markets
• media repertoires
• digital journalism
• Twitter
• social network analysis
• online news
• social media

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The fourth official language in Switzerland, Romansh, is spoken by very few people and only a few news outlets exist.

2 We used semi-automatic text mining methods in R to identify false-positives (e.g., a URL with “watson” and “ch” but not “watson.ch”) and only kept tweets that include a URL of a media outlet.

3 For 814 the followee relations could not be downloaded as they set their account to protected.

4 We used a list of the Swiss Federal Statistical Office (180 municipalities), the Federal Statistical Office of Germany (largest 701 municipalities – all with a population over 20,000), The Italian National Institute of Statistics (largest 751 municipalities – all with a population over 15,000), Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (largest 350 municipalities – all with a population over 15,000), Statistik Austria (largest 1283 municipalities – all with a population over 1000) and the Institut d’Estadística de Catalunya (all municipalities in Catalunya). We first selected all users that have not kept the location field empty in their account (72.4%) and then calculated the specific percentage of country locations based on this sample.

5 Far-right communities in Germany, Austria and Switzerland are strongly connected to each other on different social media platforms (Rauchfleisch and Kaiser 2020).

6 Back in the days of the GDR, citizens in East Germany used similar wording for “uncensored” TV channels from West Germany that could be received in most parts of the GDR (Schroeter 1994).