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Introduction

The bourgeois public sphere developed during the 17th and 18th centuries. This public sphere occupied the area between the public, with its enclosed institutions and organisations, and the private life of the family. The term was coined in 1962 by Jürgen Habermas when he developed the concept in his book entitled The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. He realised that it is within the area between the public and the private where public discourse takes place and public opinion, as the function of public discourse is formed (McQuail, 2005:180-181; Habermas, 1989:1-3). The public sphere has been realised as a necessary condition for a deliberative democracy. Here the public sphere needs to manifest commitments to freedom and equality in the communicative interaction between those taking part in the deliberative process (Bohman, 1998:73). Cohen (in Gaus, 1997) states that “the notion of a deliberative democracy is rooted in the intuitive ideal of democratic association in which justification of the terms and conditions of association proceeds through public argument and reasoning among equal citizens” which further emphasises the importance of deliberation in a democracy. Within this context of the deliberative democracy, Habermas realised that decisions regarding public affairs are made at the political centre. The political centre refers to the government agencies, parliaments, courts as well as political parties. Routine decisions are largely made without the input from the broader public. When important normative questions are at stake, however, it is necessary that extensive public discussion is incorporated and that the deliberation is not limited to the actors that occupy the centre of the political system. In cases such as these, it is important that actors from the periphery (civil society actors as well as grassroots organisations) are included in the decision making process (Marx Ferree et al, 2002: 230). The public sphere developed against the backdrop of the social conditions witnessed in the democracies of Germany, Britain and France. These conditions provoked and facilitated the situation where the bourgeois men, as private citizens, united to engage in reasoning over issues that were of mutual concern and interest. The private citizens were willing to let argumentation, rather than status and authority, guide the debate and decision-making 2 process. They united as agents yearning accountability for the societal disparities with the purpose to impose some form of control over the state (Crossley & Roberts, 2004:3; Dahlgren, 1991:3). Initially the private citizens of the bourgeois society met to deliberate on issues regarding literature, philosophy and art. These meetings and the areas they occupied became the arenas of deliberation and debate. The infrastructure referred to as the political publics were established where deliberation on literature, philosophy and art gave way to discussions regarding politics and economics. Other factors that also contributed to the development of the bourgeois public sphere include development and improvements in printing technology and the emergence of popular newsletters and journals. Thus media soon became the source of information and later the arenas of deliberation (Crossley & Roberts, 2004:3-4; Dahlgren, 2005b:34). The above mentioned factors contributed to the public sphere during the 19th century. Its climax was short lived, however and the demise of the bourgeois public sphere soon followed. Consequently, contradictions and conflicting ideas have tainted the notion of the public sphere in the 20th and 21st centuries and although the original ideas of the public sphere were set in stone, it failed to develop as an authentic representation in the contemporary reality and was acknowledged as a poor imitation of Habermas’ ideals (Dahlgren, 2005b:34). The Media has thus been one of the main intermediary institutions in the public sphere. Since the 19th century, the media have, however, changed in terms of space, time and physical barriers. In the contemporary world, media have saturated lives on a daily basis in such a way that everyday life has been inconceivable without modern means of communication (Real, 1989:13). Media act firstly as a supplier of information where they inexorably influence, educate, entertain and introduce individuals with values, beliefs and behavioural codes. These factors contribute to the integration of people into the society (Real 1989:14; McQuail, 2005: 457). It also seeks to represent a particular reality through the production and the representation of an image of society. In this way media provide the “guiding myths which shape our perception of the world and serve as important instruments of social control” (Hall in Davis, 2004:42). 3 Yet, within the public sphere, media have been greatly criticised and many believe that the public is more likely to be manipulated by the media than helped to form public opinion in a rational way. Despite this criticism, many scholars (e.g. Curran, 1991) have found that the media in the public sphere have value. Most of these positive expectations concerning the role of media in the public sphere have been expressed in relation to the emergence and existence of new media. New media refer to digital, computerised or network information and communication technologies which emerged during the 20th century (McQuail, 2005:182). One emerging contending form of new media is that of social networking sites (SNSs). Today, SNSs are embraced by political leaders and parties to conduct public discourse and produce public opinion. It is especially around election times that these sites are embraced. The most important SNSs include Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube. Of these three, Facebook is ranked as the largest SNS worldwide after overtaking MySpace during April of 2008. It is also seen as the fastest growing SNS and the most popular amongst internet users between the ages of 18 and 24 (Smith, 2008c). Because Facebook has been playing such an important role in the development of SNS, this thesis will look at its potential to act as a forum where public discourse can take place and where public opinion can be facilitated. The potential of Facebook as facilitator of public opinion will be explored. In the following section the background and rationale of the study will be indicated which will lead to the formulation of the problem statement and the research question of this study. 1.2. Background and Rationale According to the Generations Online in 2009 study (Jones & Fox, 2009) adult American internet users can be categorised according to their age. The individuals born in 1977-1990 (referred to as the Millenials or Generation Y) constitute the largest percentage of internet users at 26%; followed by the individuals born in 1968-1976 (Generation X) at 20%. Individuals born in 1955-1964 (Younger Boomers) constitute 20%; individuals born in 1946- 1954 (Older Boomers) 13%; individuals born in 1937-1945 (Silent Generation) and finally those born before 1963 (G.I. Generation) both at 9% each. Thus it is clear that the largest proportion of internet users in the United States of America (USA) is those between the ages of 18 and 32 (Millenials or Generation Y) (Jones & Fox, 2009:1). 4 Amongst these demographic age groups it has been found that teenagers and Generation Y are the people most likely to use the internet as a tool of communication. Individuals between the ages of 12 and 32 are more likely to use SNSs and to create profiles and to partake in the virtual spheres (Jones & Fox, 2009:3). This group is further narrowed by a study conducted by Lenhart (2009) which states that Generation Y can be reduced to a smaller group – 18-24 years. What is significant about this group is that those between the ages of 18 and 24 have been recognised as the previously politically disengaged age demographic. This is the age demographic that will be used for the purpose of this study. The sample will however be explained later on. Amongst the internet users of these demographic age groups in the USA, 75% have a profile on a SNS (Lenhart, 2009:1). During the 2008 presidential election, Facebook was deliberately used as a tool of political communication. The campaigns initially followed traditional communication strategies which included television advertisements, campaign rallies, direct mail as well as press coverage. The Democratic as well as the Republican parties extended their campaigns to include various websites on the internet. It started with personal homepages (e.g. www.johnmccain.com and www.my.Barackobama.com) and later social network websites were included. Campaigners saw the potential of social networks; not only as a forum of debate, but also as a means to communicate to the younger generation (often those who were previously politically disengaged) in the USA (Westling, 2007:6). Why was Facebook embraced as a facilitator of public opinion? Facebook has abilities that could facilitate political communication. It combines the features of local bulletin boards, newspapers and organisation and places them in one location that is available any time any place. Facebook allows members of a geographic centre of the population to voice their opinions on various topics whilst giving them the choice of the intensity of contribution. Also, political leaders can use Facebook as a medium to communicate with members of the public who are willing to listen without actively imposing their messages on these members. It thus provides political leaders with an effective way in which they can reach the public. At the same time members of the public can use this as an opportunity where their own opinions can be directed towards leaders and where they can organise themselves towards a certain cause (Westling, 2007:5). 5 Thus, during the election, Facebook has shown the potential of being a forum where political leaders can communicate with the public in a way that opinion polls cannot. Facebook provides campaigns with the ability to organise support and communicate with members of the public in a very efficient way. It also provides members of the public with the ability and the chance to communicate back to these leaders and voice their own opinions and organise themselves around their causes. Facebook doesn’t merely serve as a forum where this communication takes place; it also has the potential to expand Jürgen Habermas’ idea of the public sphere. It allows the public to engage in political action both in conjunction with and independently of political campaigns (Westling, 2007:2). 1.3. Problem Statement Before the advent of new media, the earlier mass media of press and broadcasting were seen as adequate and beneficial for the conduct of democratic politics and the sustainment of public opinion in the public sphere. These forms of media enabled the information about public events to be passed to all citizens and politicians and governments were able to be criticised by the society. However, information flow was predominantly vertical or onedirectional and the heightened commercialisation of the media market lead to the neglect of democratic communication roles between the public itself and the leaders, institutions and organisations within mass media. Thus, earlier forms of mass communication limited access and discouraged active political participation and deliberative dialogue within the public sphere (McQuail, 2005: 150).

Previous studies have investigated how newspapers use social media (Hille and Bakker, 2013) and whether having many subscribers to a newspaper’s social media account has certain benefits (Ju et al., 2014). However, the audience of newspaper content on social media is not limited to direct subscribers. A defining characteristics of social media platforms is that the diffusion of content largely occurs through technologically enhanced social network processes (Klinger and Svensson, 2015). Each active user is a participant in the diffusion process, because their engagement with news content (i.e. liking, commenting, and sharing) makes the content visible to their social alters and thereby promotes its propagation throughout the network (Hermida et al., 2012). Furthermore, anyone can share links to news items, regardless of whether the newspaper itself shares these links, which is also made easy through the widespread availability of social media buttons—social media plug-ins on websites that allow people to directly like, comment, and share content (Gerlitz and Helmond, 2013). This involvement of individual users in the selection and distribution of news leads to “increasingly complex relationships between news production and consumption” (Goode, 2009: 1304) that warrant new research and debate. In this article, we focus on how the importance of user engagement for news distribution on social media makes it difficult to determine how much of the total audience of newspaper items on social media can actually be attributed to the work of social media editors.

To investigate this, we propose a method to estimate the proportion of audience engagement with news content on social media that can be attributed to specific users and apply this method to study the influence of social media editors on Facebook. Building on gatekeeping theory, we define the social media editor channel as the flow of newspaper items on Facebook that trace back to the publication of these items by the newspaper’s social media editors (Barzilai-Nahon, 2008; Shoemaker and Vos, 2009). We refer to all other ways through which newspaper items enter circulation on social media (e.g. individual users, other news pages, interest groups) as the alternative channel. By measuring how influential these competing channels are, we address what Lewin (1947) stated to be the first diagnostic task of gatekeeping research: finding out who the gatekeepers are. If social media editors are indeed influential gatekeepers, this warrants investigation into their norms and routines regarding the selection and presentation of news items. If a substantial portion of the distribution stems from alternative channels, this calls for research into who the gatekeepers of these channels are (for which the method proposed in this study can be used). Based on our analysis, we also address how the role of social media editors in the gatekeeping process intersects with the role of individual users and what this means for the definition of gatekeeping on social network sites.

Our analysis covers six newspapers, two from the United Kingdom, two from the Netherlands, and two from Flanders, over the course of 2 weeks in 2017. For each newspaper, we monitored all news item publications on the website in real-time via the RSS feed. For each news item, we then monitored the Facebook engagement scores by querying the Facebook Graph API with their canonical URL, for every 30 minutes since the publication time until up to 3 days. The resulting time series per news item are then analyzed with multilevel pooled time series analysis. In addition to providing new empirical insights into the role of social media editors for newspapers on Facebook, we argue that this method has promising applications for other questions regarding news diffusion on social media.

Gatekeeping on social media

Gatekeeping theory addresses how the news messages that circulate throughout society are selected and shaped (Shoemaker and Reese, 1996; Shoemaker and Vos, 2009). Given the huge amount of events that occur each day, and the virtually countless number of ways to describe them, why do certain news messages spread like wildfire while other are left untold? To understand this, one of the most important factors is to understand the people, organizations, and institutions that control the most far and wide-reaching communication channels, such as television, newspapers, and online platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. The actors that control these channels can be conceptualized as gatekeepers, referring to their power to decide which messages may and may not pass through their channels. Perhaps the most vivid example stems from the seminal gatekeeping study of David Manning White (1950), who investigated how the wire editor of a local newspaper, referred to as mr. Gates, selected which messages were published.

Kurt Lewin (1947), who coined gatekeeping, argued that gatekeepers operate in a complex field, in which the gatekeeper and its environment “have to be considered as one constellation of interdependent factors” (p. 338). There are many studies that show that journalists are often influenced by the work of their colleagues (Cook, 2005; Crouse, 1972; Vliegenthart and Walgrave, 2008). A particularly strong form of interdependence occurs when gatekeepers operate within the same channels. For example, mr. Gates guarded the final gate before news reaches the audience, but before a news item arrived at mr. Gates’ desk, a reporter had already decided that an event was worth writing about. This direct interdependence of gatekeepers needs to be taken into account when we analyze who the most important gatekeepers of society are. Bass (1969) argued, for instance, that when we study the gatekeeping process by investigating individual news outlets, we tend to underestimate the gatekeeping role of news agencies on which these news outlets often rely for much information. This claim might be even more accurate now, as many online channels lack their own news-gathering apparatus and mainly seek to curate and reinterpret news that is already circulating (Baum and Groeling, 2008; Welbers et al., 2018).

With the rising popularity of social media as a popular platform for news distribution, complex networks of interdependent gatekeepers are emerging (Goode, 2009). Someone, possibly a news organization itself, can post a news item or a link to a news item on a platform such as Facebook. A person who has a direct social network tie to the original poster can see this post and can interact with the post (e.g. liking, commenting, sharing).1 Other people connected to this person can see these interactions, due to which the content can diffuse further throughout the network. Essentially, this makes every actor that is exposed to the content a potential gatekeeper, but with different levels of influence (Shoemaker and Vos, 2009). Actors with a central position in the network, such as news organizations with many followers, can reach many people at once, akin to traditional mass communication. Yet, as we will address shortly, due to the speed of communication and high level of interconnectedness on social media, news with a high level of “shareworthiness” (Trilling et al., 2017) can diffuse rapidly even without mass communication, similar to how a contagious virus can spread rapidly throughout a dense population.

The notion of gatekeeping on social media requires a different conceptualization than the one used by White (1950) to describe the work of mr. Gates. In the traditional gatekeeping literature, the gatekeeper is someone who guards discrete gates that determine which news does and does not reach the audience. In a strict following of this definition, it can be argued that there will not be any gatekeepers in the digital age because the redundancy of channels “undermines the idea that there are discrete gates through which political information passes: if there are no gates, there can be no gatekeepers” (Williams and Carpini, 2000: 61). But this does not mean that gatekeeping theory is no longer useful. In debating the continued relevance of gatekeeping, we must cautiously distinguish between gatekeeping as a theoretical tradition and metaphor and remember that the metaphor is not set in stone, but serves as an interpretative tool (Heinderyckx, 2015). In contemporary gatekeeping literature, a broader interpretation of gatekeeping is often used, which is more in line with the original use of the term by Lewin (1947). Building on Lewin’s field theory, Shoemaker and Vos (2009) demonstrated how gatekeeping is still a valuable lens for understanding how news is created and circulated today, both as a theory and as a metaphor.

Still, there is a need to “reimagine gatekeeping as a concept in the digital era” (Vos, 2015: 7), and several scholars have proposed alternative frameworks and metaphors to supplement or replace gatekeeping. Bruns (2005) argued that the gatekeeping concept does not adequately describe the work of many new participants in the news circulation process. Influential blogs and individuals on social media often do not keep gates of their own, but keep watch of existing gates to create a curated hub for their audience. Bruns (2005) conceptualizes this practice as “gatewatching” and argues that it is slowly replacing the traditional role for journalists. Alternatively, Singer (2014) argues that audiences have become important participants in the gatekeeping process and defines their role in relation to news media as a form of “secondary gatekeeping.” Taking a broader focus, Thorson and Wells (2015) developed the “curation of flows” framework in which journalistic curation is positioned next to four sets of curating actors: “individual media consumers themselves; social others embedded in online and offline networks; strategic communicators; and algorithms designed to shape the discovery and presentation of content in many digital contexts” (p. 31). The focus on curation is a deliberate step away from gatekeeping, which in this framework more specifically refers to the “curation practices of journalistic organizations” (Thorson and Wells, 2015: 31).

To conceptualize and understand gatekeeping in the context of social networks, we can also build on social network theory, where gatekeeping in a network context has long since been a field of study (Freeman, 1980). It is interesting to note that this gatekeeping tradition can also be traced back to Kurt Lewin (1947), in particular through the work on network centrality by Bavelas (1948), who was also a student of Lewin (Scott, 2011). Despite having these shared roots, the gatekeeping traditions in journalism research and network theory have evolved mostly as two separate branches. Where gatekeeping in journalism research has for a long time revolved mainly around unidirectional mass communication, gatekeeping in network theory focused on multi-directional interactions between many people. With the rise of news diffusion through social media, where mass communication merges with niche media and interpersonal communication, the social network literature has become more relevant for journalism.

For this study, the concept of network diffusion is of particular interest (Valente, 1995). For a news organization to reach many people on social media, it does not only matter how many people it can reach directly, but also whether these people themselves pass on the item, and the continuation of this diffusion process. This is related to secondary gatekeeping (Singer, 2014) and gatewatching (Bruns, 2005), but network theory contributes a more general framework for how diffusion through the interaction of many individuals works. A common metaphor for this process is that of a virus, which is typically passed on via dyadic ties between individuals, but can nevertheless diffuse rapidly throughout a population. Within this metaphor, the concept of contagion is used to describe the transfer of information or ideas between individuals (Lerman and Ghosh, 2010), which for news diffusion shares common ground with the concept of shareworthiness (Trilling et al., 2017). On social network sites, this virus-like propagation of content through connected individuals explains how news can quickly reach many people—popularly known as “going viral”—even without the use of mass communication (Klinger and Svensson, 2015). As the mechanism for contagion relies on user engagement with content, each individual in the network participates in the curation of flows (Thorson and Wells, 2015).

Thus, it follows that to determine the gatekeeping influence of social media editors, we cannot simply look at the size of their direct contacts (e.g. friends or followers on Facebook, followers on Twitter). Rather, we need to look at how their use of social media to publish their own news items (or links to these items) affects the overall diffusion of these items. For this, we need to have some way to measure the success of the diffusion (i.e. often being shared or otherwise interacted with) of these items and also need to be able to control for other factors—in particular other gatekeepers—that could affect the diffusion. In this study, we propose a method to investigate this, which we use to investigate to what extent newspapers can influence the diffusion of their news items on Facebook through their public Facebook pages.