New Delhi: Since Twitter was founded in 2006, the microblogging site has come to play a major role for news organisations, owing to its 45-crore-strong audience. While the social media platform has largely helped promote news content, what happens when it becomes a source of information? And is journalism of the ‘what’s happening on Twitter’ variety sustainable?
News organisations that rely heavily on articles about what’s popular on Twitter don’t get more views on such articles than for their original content, according to a study by French scholars affiliated with Sciences Po and the French National Audiovisual Archive.
Such articles are also most likely to be published by outlets that are hungry for advertising revenue and don’t come with a paywall, and end up having their journalists misunderstand their audience. In short, social media journalism may hamper editorial quality, claimed the study, published Saturday in a column on Vox EU — a portal where scholars publish research-based views.
The researchers tried to find the answer by studying more than two billion tweets in French, posted between August 2018 and July 2019.
The study was conducted by by Julia Cagé, associate professor of economics at Sciences Po (Paris Institute of Political Studies), Béatrice Mazoyer, research engineer at the same institute, and Nicolas Hervé, senior research engineer at the French National Audiovisual Archive (Institut National de l’Audiovisuel).
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‘Twitter sets agenda of media coverage’
The authors combined their analysis of the tweets with what mainstream media published or aired during the same time, and also measured the reactions to the tweets in terms of likes, retweets, and replies.
The study claimsed that when people start tweeting about an event constantly, they may influence news organisations to plan coverage around such topics.
“Everything else equal — and, in particular, independently of the newsworthiness of a story — a 55 per cent increase in the number of tweets posted before the first media article on a story leads to an increase in the number of news articles covering the story corresponding to 17 per cent of the mean. In other words, Twitter sets the agenda of media coverage in a quantitatively meaningful way,” the authors wrote.
‘Short-term considerations’ about ad revenues
According to the authors of the study, large news organisations that employ a greater umber of journalists who have Twitter accounts are more likely to monitor conversations on the microblogging platform. Hence, Twitter in such circumstances becomes a source.
The authors also scanned news coverage by the mainstream media and found that most of this Twitter-led news is published or aired by news organisations that are more dependent on advertising revenues, when more views result in more advertisement on their website.
As the dependency on ad revenues decreases (or when a paywall in some form is put up), the likelihood of news organisations covering the social media conversation also decreases.
A paywall is a digital lock that requires a reader to subscribe to the content to be able to read or view it. The authors further segregated paywalls in terms of their rigidity. A hard paywall is one that doesn’t allow a reader to access the content unless it has been paid for. Other types of paywall included freemium sites — which offer a limited number of free articles, or require readers to view or read advertisements to be able to continue reading the content.
This is evident from the fact that among the media outlets that the authors studied, more than half (52 per cent) did not have any paywall. In fact, of all the media outlets covering such news, less than one per cent (0.8 per cent) had a hard paywall (subscription necessary to access content).
“Twitter influences mainstream media because of short-term considerations generated by advertising revenue-bearing clicks,” the authors said.
The study also went on to claim that covering things that are already popular on Twitter does not translate into more views. This, according to the authors, stems from the fact that Twitter users are not the “general representative” of the real news reading or viewing audience.
Shall we, shan’t we
The authors cited extant research that has argued that the rise of new technology has saved costs for the newsrooms, but that this has come at the cost of quality. Since most Twitter-worthy journalism is published by news organisations without a paywall, the likelihood of poor consumers who are unwilling to pay for news being manipulated by such news also increases, the authors argued.
“Because media outlets whose content is available online for free tend to be more influenced by the popularity of stories on Twitter than those using a paywall, the platform generates an increase in information inequality, making disadvantaged voters further vulnerable to manipulation”, they said.
In conclusion, the authors found that views on Twitter-based stories do not outnumber those on original content, which, they argued, means that too much reliance on Twitter may hamper the journalists’ perception about what the audience wants to read.
(Edited by Poulomi Banerjee)
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