Are partisan, unreliable, digital-born, and mass-oriented media more likely to thrive on social media? Comparing four information ecosystems

Abstract Social media platforms form information ecosystems distinct from the Web and reconfigure power relationships, especially the distribution of visibilities, among news media. We developed a theoretical framework based on structuration theory to explain the differences between the Web and social media, and investigated four prominent factors: institutional legacy, information reliability, ideological differences, and news inequalities. This study collected social media data from three platforms (Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube; N = 8.4 million posts), web traffic data, and an information reliability index for 766 media outlets in the USA. We investigated how four factors explained differences between the platforms and the Web: media outlets that were digital-born (compared to newspapers), partisan, and mass-oriented gained greater visibilities on platforms relative to their web traffic. Meanwhile, the three platforms displayed differences. For example, only Twitter showed significantly increased visibilities of unreliable sources. Our multiplatform research design demonstrates the impact of platformization on journalism.