Ideological Asymmetries, but no Fragmentation: Results of a Political Cartography of News Sharing

Abstract

Online sharing strongly guides which news people encounter on a daily basis. Yet, especially in a multiparty political context, we lack a holistic framework to capture which news is circulated by which groups or partisans, to what extent circulation of news is fragmented and to what degree it is intermediated. We provide such a general political cartography of news sharing on German Twitter (March 2023, now X) on the content and outlet level, based on a survey-validated two-dimensional political space. The political fringes are most actively circulating news, especially right-wing elite-/EU-skeptical/protectionist users. Outlets mostly shared by right-leaning users turn out to supply news to both highly elite/EUskeptical/protectionist users and their ideological counterparts – but not the same stories. We do not find evidence for strong news fragmentation. However, news sharing is disproportionately reliant on few intermediaries towards the right and elite-/EU-skeptical/protectionist dimension. Implications for future research are discussed