Relevance & Research Question
News sharing on digital platforms is a crucial activity that determines the digital spaces millions of users navigate. Yet, we know little about general patterns of news sharing – previous studies have focused on sharing of misinformation or specific/partisan outlets. To address this gap, we utilize a combination of three data sources to elucidate the extent to which sharing patterns of certain political user groups consist of specific outlets/topics/articles or have unknown diversity. Which types of news are shared in different political regions of Twitter? Are there news that are shared across the political spectrum?
Methods & Data

We combine multiple data sources via state-of-the-art network embedding methods and automated text analysis:

- we collected all tweets which contained a link to one of 26 legacy of alternative news outlets for March/2023 (2.5M tweets).
- we crawled the full texts of the articles if available (30K texts); articles were assigned topics with a paragraph-based BERTopic model.
- we collected the follower network of German MPs; we embedded all followers and MPs in a latent political space using correspondence analysis; CA reveals two clearly interpretable dimensions: one shows a clear distinction between AfD and MPs of all other parties; in the other dimension, all parties except AfD are arranged on a left-right axis.

Results
We investigate which types of articles are shared in which political regions of the latent space. We observe interesting, partly counterintuitive sharing patterns: Left-leaning outlets are shared by users in different political regions if the topic serves their political cause (qualitative example: an article of Die Zeit critical of working conditions at Deutsche Bahn was shared mostly by users following AfD or CDU/FDP politicians). On the other hand, soft/non-political news seem to be shared only by users in the 'mainstream' political region of the network (example: article on Lena Meyer-Landrut (Bild-Zeitung) with thousands of shares was not shared a single time by AfD followers). We explore these patterns systematically.
Added Value
We use digital trace data from a broad selection of news outlets. This is one of the first works that combine network embeddings with automated full-text analysis of news.

Relevance & Research Question

Facebook allows for direct communication with voters in the electorates. An issue that is divisive or polarizing on social media and political discourse is migration. This raises the guiding research question, of whether MPs who have positive or negative attitudes toward migration are more likely to speak in parliament on the issue or post about it on Facebook.
Methods & Data

This study compares the classical form of political speeches in parliament with social media communication on Facebook by members of parliament of the 18th German Bundestag (2013-2017). While prior studies compared political speech in parliamentary speeches and on social media focused on Twitter messages, this study uses a unique data set linking parliamentary speeches with election data, a candidate survey (GLES), and MPs’ social media communication on Facebook. The linked data allows to control for a number of candidate characteristics and test the influence of party or migration-attitudes on speaking and posting behaviour.

The first part of the analysis examines factors associated with general political communication activity in parliament and on Facebook and deploys a generalized linear quasi-Poisson mode, whilst the second part identifies migration-related speeches and posting using a dictionary approach and also analyses the association with candidate characteristics in a quasi-Poisson model.

Results

The first part of the analysis finds that party differences and candidacy play a role in speech activity, whereas being from a ’left-centrist’ party (DIE LINKE, SPD, GRÜNE) is positively associated with the number of Facebook messages issued by MPs.

The second part focuses on migration-related communication activity. Against the expectation that MPs with negative migration stances might have used Facebook more intensively to post about migration, the findings indicate that MPs who are in favour of migration were more likely to speak about migration-related issues in parliament and post about it on Facebook.
Added Value
The study uses a unique linked data set combining candidate studies with social media data and parliamentary speech data. The analysis could be improved by using contemporary large language models instead of a dictionary approach and the author would like to discuss added value with fellow conference attendees.