Camouflage and contortion:
How Instagram shapes the production and circulation of news content
Sarah Dear | 12256552 | sarahdearuk@gmail.com MA New Media and Digital Culture
Supervisor: Thomas Poell Second Reader: Bernhard Rieder
Camouflage and contortion:
How Instagram shapes the production and circulation of news content
Abstract
This thesis focuses on the Instagram accounts of eight of the UK’s most well-known news outlets to ask how the social media platform shapes news content. The research is developed in critical dialogue with previous literature spanning journalism studies, platformization and Instagram research to problematise the point at their intersection, questioning how news outlets use the platform to reach new, young audiences and how the platform as a techno-commercial system exercises governance over news outlets as a user group. This research focuses on Instagram as a relatively new and highly visual platform with a notably large user base, adding a new focus to research on the platformization of news production. In this investigation, content from eight news outlets is examined in tandem with an exploration of Instagram’s interface design, algorithmic selection and business aims. It is found that news items undergo a process of measuring and filtering, simplifying and containing, and are increasingly shared ephemerally on the platform. This process leads news items to be camouflaged—disguised as lightweight platform content—and contorted—twisted from their usual form into content specifically shaped for platform optimization—as news outlets attempt to gain visibility from Instagram’s algorithm and build an engaged audience. This thesis seeks to understand what is different about the platform era in the history of technology and journalism, revealing concerns for Instagram’s ability to add diversity to the wider news sphere. This thesis also examines content shared on Instagram’s stories feature, a relatively new impermanent format where content disappears after 24 hours. As the impermanent is an understudied format within platform studies, this thesis creates a methodology for studying Instagram stories and provides interesting new insights, exploring the limitations of ephemeral data collection and raising concerns for the format’s compatibility with institutional accountability.
Keywords
Platformization, platform studies, news media, journalism, Instagram
Table of contents
Introduction p. 3
Chapter 1. Problematising the literature: the intertwinement of journalism and platforms p. 8
1.1 Journalism studies: how technology shapes journalism p. 8
1.2 Software studies: how platforms structure information p. 11
1.3 Instagram studies: the gap in knowledge p. 15
Chapter 2. Building a rounded methodology for Instagram research p. 19
2.1 Narrowing the research focus p. 19
2.2 Selecting accounts p. 20
2.3 Data collection p. 23
2.4 Coding p. 26
Chapter 3. Measuring and filtering: how news outlets are governed by audience metrics and algorithmic selection
p. 31
Chapter 4. Simplified and contained: how Instagram produces norms of sharing amongst news outlets p. 40
Chapter 5. Increasing impermanence: an exploration of news items shared through Instagram’s stories feature p. 48 Conclusion p. 57
Introduction
On 18 February 2019, seven members of parliament (MPs) from the UK Labour Party announced their resignations. They were splitting from the left-leaning parliamentary opposition party to form a new, more centrist alliance: The Independent Group. This was a significant event within British politics; as the British public became more divided in their opinion on Brexit, amongst other issues, their representatives’ views and corresponding party alignments became more blurred and fragile. This unexpected event gained coverage from newspapers across the political spectrum: out of eight well-known news outlets in the UK, six reported on the Labour Party’s partial fragmentation on their website homepage. However, turning to the corresponding Instagram account for the eight news outlets, there was a distinct lack of coverage on the issue. Only The Guardian and Sky News shared posts on the platform about the split, opting to share image quotes or press photos of the seven MPs. BBC News covered the story via Instagram’s stories feature, superimposing a caption over a video of Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party, leaving his house. The caption read: “What’s next for Labour after MPs quit? Swipe up!”.
Two days later, the BRIT Awards, an annual celebration of British and international music, took place in London. In comparison to the news of the Labour Party split, the BRIT Awards received an unprecedented amount of attention from the same eight news outlets on Instagram. Across just 24 hours, the news outlets shared eleven posts and seventeen stories from the BRIT Awards. An Instagram story from the Daily Mirror asked viewers to “rate Caroline Flack’s dress” using a heart-eyes emoji slider, and ITV News presented rolling coverage and interviews from the event’s red carpet. However, the event received minimal coverage on the website homepage of each outlet, with only the Daily Mail placing an article with gossip from the after-party on their website’s headlines section.
Social media platforms are becoming increasingly important and highly utilised spaces for news outlets to reach new audiences and form relationships with their readers; a multi-year study into United States publishers and platforms found that a growing number of news outlets see investing in social media as the only option for a sustainable future (Tandoc and Maitra, 2018, p. 1681; Bell and Owen, 2017, p. 7). However, as indicated by the two examples above, news coverage when filtered through a platform does not necessarily reflect the editorial preferences that a news outlet shows on their own digital properties. These examples suggest that certain types of content seem to be utilised and privileged on digital platforms, raising questions about the circulation of information through platform infrastructures. As Gillespie’s (2017) dissection of the platform metaphor explains, platforms discursively position themselves as mere conduits of information, and therefore as impartial intermediaries that do not exercise
control over the content shared through their infrastructure between user groups. However, digital platforms are never impartial; each of their decisions shapes the conditions for information production and sharing within the platform infrastructure (Gillespie, 2010, p. 358). These decisions are weaved in at many levels, such as algorithmic choices that determine content visibility, or the positioning of advertisements amongst content from other providers, or the affordances and interface features that promote certain actions amongst users (Bucher, 2012; Rieder and Sire, 2014; Bucher and Helmond, 2017). Each decision potentially has wide-reaching effects on the wider society, as platforms have a habit of pulling in elements of public life and reshaping them in the platform’s image (Van Dijck, de Waal, and Poell, 2018, p. 64).
When one considers that digital intermediaries restructure the environment in which other media organisations operate, exposing the decisions made by platforms becomes particularly important for understanding the modern landscape of news sharing (Nielsen and Ganter, 2018, p. 1614). Control over the circulation of information and the ability to reach mass audiences has traditionally been reserved for news organisations, yet the rise of digital platforms has significantly opened this playing field; any digital platform user now has the ability to share information with a large number of people across the globe, to build their own platform so to speak, as long as they can garner enough attention through the platform interface. This democratization of the ability to amplify information removes the pedestal from traditional news organisations; this thesis is therefore positioned alongside literature concerned with the relationship between publishers and platforms, asking how an old institution adapts to a new playing field, plus the novel formats and altered power dynamics that accompany it (e.g. Bell and Owen, 2017; Tandoc and Maitra, 2018; Nielsen and Ganter, 2018).
The transformation of journalism at the hands of platforms has been met by a growing number of concerns regarding the circulation of information in digital-focused democratic societies. These concerns are built on older worries that new technologies might hinder the quality of public debate. For instance, in 1985, Neil Postman expressed concern over how the television, as the rising medium of the time, might change the nature of public discourse. Following a McLuhanesque stance where the medium used for human communication impacts the nature of that communication, Postman (1985/2006, p. 125) argued that television blurs the lines between news and entertainment, leading to the former being repackaged as the latter, creating an environment of disinformation in the sense that news is superficial, fragmented and misplaced. Postman (1985/2006, p. 128) argues that this landscape of amusements leaves the public without context or coherence, leading to their indifference towards the world’s events. As the technologies used to source and share information have evolved throughout recent history, the surrounding
concerns have shifted. As argued by both Sunstein (2007) and Pariser (2012), the algorithmic filtering enabled by the Internet—and more recently, by platforms—creates a particular, personalised online landscape for each of us who encounter it. This landscape is unique to each user, and the algorithmic selection employed means that individuals are more likely to receive information that reinforces their beliefs than challenges it (Pariser, 2012, p. 51). This siphons individuals into calculated publics, potentially harming the diversity of public knowledge and the rationality of political dialogue (Gillespie, 2014, p. 188). Whereas Postman’s (1985/2006) fears were for the choices made by the editorial gatekeepers of the mainstream media using television, current worries come from an entirely new gatekeeper: the personalised algorithms that filter and structure knowledge on the modern web.
The new algorithmic gatekeepers and the platform businesses that construct them have put the economic sustainability and traditional business models of the old gatekeepers—the mainstream news—under enormous pressure. In the digital age, long-standing institutional news outlets are beginning to crumble: in the UK, this can be seen through recent changes such as the demise of the Independent’s daily print copy and the 250 redundancies made at The Guardian as part of an attempt to break even financially (Wahl-Jorgensen et al., 2016, p. 810; Bond and Bond, 2017). In this landscape, news outlets are quick to adapt their journalistic practices to new social media technologies in the hope that this will lead to a more sustainable future for their business (Bell and Owen, 2017, p. 23). In doing so, news outlets have to negotiate their journalistic ethics with the objectives of multinational platform corporations. If the flow of diverse information is critical to a functioning democracy, it becomes especially important to consider how platforms shape circulation; honing in on the relationship between the traditional mass information disseminators and their personalisation-focused replacements seems like a useful site of research for this task.
Instagram is the latest platform to be considered of growing importance for news outlets to connect with audiences (Wahl-Jorgensen et al., 2016, p. 811). As an image-sharing app that is extremely popular with younger generations, and also as a service larger than Snapchat and Twitter combined, it hosts “a sizable audience that could be very valuable to traditional publishers and journalists” (Albright, 2017; Baker, 2015). Instagram is perceived by news outlets as a novel opportunity to bring in younger audiences to their journalism, as indicated by BBC News’ social media editor, who remarked that the platform holds an audience that does not necessarily come into contact with BBC News’ output in another way (Scott, 2017). Sizeable social media platforms like Instagram have the ability to spread attention and create awareness, therefore, as users increasingly learn about the world through social media platforms rather than direct media access, it is important to remember that the platform’s prioritisation may systematically leave some issues of public interest in the dark.
This thesis is concerned with the relationship between Instagram and the news outlets that turn to it, and the central question of this research is how Instagram as a techno-commercial system shapes the content shared by news outlets using the platform. It seeks to consider the power dynamics between news outlets as platform users and the underlying structures of the platform businesses they rely on. It also seeks to contribute to a body of literature questioning what is distinctive about the platform era in the history of negotiations between journalism and technology. This research focuses on a platform of increasing popularity, seeking to unearth the tendencies of the medium and consider the implications of these trends for the future of news consumption and platform research. The choice of platform is forward-thinking, as Instagram is not only an under-utilised space within new media studies, but is also home to a young user base who are formulating news consumption practices for the next generation. As Sunstein (2007, p. 51) argues, providing people with a wide range of topics and ideas is essential to a functioning democracy, therefore, this research also asks how Instagram content shared by the eight news outlets contributes to the wider news sphere.
To consider how Instagram as a techno-commercial system shapes how news outlets use the platform, this research focuses on a case study of eight of the most well-known UK news outlets from across the political spectrum, including both digitized and digitally native outlets. The next chapter critically engages with research into the platformization of news production in a variety of ways. It starts by outlining current journalism studies research into how the industry has adapted to platform technology and the proliferation of audience metrics, then shifts to software studies to critically assess research into the underlying mechanics of social media platforms. Finally, the chapter turns towards new media research that specifically focuses on Instagram, highlighting a lack of research into institutional platform users and a distinct absence of research into ephemeral content shared through the platform’s popular stories feature. Through critically engaging with these three traditions, it emerges that there is a distinct lack of research at their intersection: the use of Instagram by news outlets as shaped by the platform’s technicity. The objective of this thesis is therefore to gain an understanding of Instagram’s underlying techno-commercial infrastructure and its effects on the circulation of information through examining how UK news outlets use the platform.
The process for delimiting the corpus of news outlets and the methodology for building a coded dataset of their Instagram content is then outlined, drawing upon the Digital Methods Institute’s Instagram Scraper to retrieve data from archivable Instagram posts and building a methodology for the extraction of ephemeral stories. The subsequent three chapters synthesise the ways in which Instagram shapes news content, conceived as a process. First, news outlets measure and filter news items to share on Instagram, then they simplify and contain news items within
the boundaries of the platform and, finally, they share news items as ephemeral content for brief interaction. It is concluded that this process contorts news items to the confines of the platform, with news items being camouflaged in followers’ feeds in the quest for platform visibility. The conclusion considers how this process affects Instagram’s contribution to the wider news sphere, considering how these platform-specific findings contribute to a discourse concerned with democracy and debate in the wider platform landscape. The thesis ends with a caution for the recent rise of ephemeral content, questioning how disappearing stories undermine institutional accountability and necessitate new methods and sites for platform research.
Chapter 1. Problematising the literature: the intertwinement of journalism and platforms
1.1 Journalism studies: how technology shapes journalism
The central observation of this thesis is that content shared by news outlets on Instagram seems to be filtered by something other than journalistic editing choices, as the content that news outlets share on the platform does not match the content prioritised on their corresponding websites. This observation is rooted in the assumption that journalistic practice is shaped by the technology that it utilises. As suggested by the journalism and media studies scholar Pavlik (2000), technology has always shaped journalism: from the printing press to the television to the Internet. Therefore, the influence of social media platforms over journalistic content is a repurposing of this common notion within journalism research rather than a novel idea. Pavlik (2000, p. 229) argues that technology influences journalism in a number of ways: the nature of the content that journalists produce, how journalists conduct their work, the structure of the newsroom and the news industry, and the relationship between news outlets and their audiences. There is a large body of journalism studies literature that applies Pavlik’s (2000) diagnosis to the current advent of social media platforms, acting as a useful gateway to consider how Instagram might influence news outlets’ sharing practices. This body of literature focuses on the shifting relationship between technology and journalism; this section critically engages with research that follows this tradition to draw out possible ways that Instagram might shape news production.
Given that this thesis is concerned with the notion that social media platforms exercise some form of control over journalistic content shared on the platform, it is important to consider why news outlets have turned to social media in the current industry landscape of financial uncertainty. As part of a multi-year study into the relationship between publishers and platforms in the US and Canada conducted by the Tow Journalism Center, Bell and Owen (2017, p. 25) found that news outlets felt forced to follow their audiences to the mobile and social web in order to reach and retain new readers, despite awareness that optimising their journalism for different platforms may not provide a return on investment. A study by Lischka (2018, p. 8), which focuses on interviews with social media editors from news outlets in Finland and Switzerland, further elaborates on the importance of social media for news outlets despite its unreliable monetary value; social media is envisioned as a gateway to tie users to the news outlet, to reach younger users, and enhance the news outlet’s relationship with social media users. Lischka’s (2018) research corresponds with trade press research undertaken for this thesis, for instance, The Guardian’s social media team said
that their aim for their social media presence (in particular on Instagram) is to cultivate a young loyal audience who can be converted into long-term readers (Davies, 2018).
If social media constitutes a gateway to younger audiences, this motivation may affect what sort of content news outlets prioritise on these platforms. Lischka’s (2018, p. 10) research also found that social media editors often prioritised sharing news that elicited emotion or surprise on the news outlets’ Facebook pages. This encouraged the editors to prioritise sharing news items categorised as entertainment or health over ‘heavier’ features concerned with foreign politics or economic news. Interestingly, Lischka (2018, p. 12) found that social media editors would attempt to give hard news “lightweight characteristics”, and if the news item could be portrayed as seemingly lightweight then it would be deemed as more appropriate to share on their social media channels. This offers a glimpse into the types of stories that might be prioritised on Instagram. However, while this research seems to recognise the influence of user feedback over news outlets sharing on social media, there is still a missing element of critical engagement in regards to the technicity of social media platforms. For instance, could there be a link between platform features and the fact that news with lightweight characteristics receives higher engagement from its user base? This thesis aims to add depth to the argument that technology shapes journalism by adding a lens of technicity to news outlets’ use of Instagram. It is interesting to briefly note that, although Lischka’s (2018, p. 8) study focused on Facebook, interviewees deemed Instagram as the second most important channel for social media editors, adding weight to the methodological choice made in this thesis to diversify away from Facebook and focus on Instagram.
Social media platforms provide news outlets with metrics to track audience engagement and potentially alter their journalistic output accordingly. The audience metrics offered by social media are a reincarnation of web metrics, which allow news outlets to track readers’ behaviour on their websites; therefore, the tensions unearthed by social media metrics within the newsroom can be traced back to the introduction of web metrics. In research undertaken by Anderson (2011a) into the use of web metrics in Philadelphia and Newark newsrooms, journalists seem to hold an optimistic view of audience metrics, envisioning the data as an immediate “glimpse into the mind of their audience” (p. 536). However, Anderson (2011b, p. 563) also found that web metrics increasingly influenced how journalists viewed their audiences: shifting from passive readers to active participants, simultaneously needing to have their desires met and to be captured and quantified. An investigation by Usher (2013) into the use of web metrics by Al Jazeera English (AJE) reveals how web metrics lead newsrooms to negotiate between retaining editorial credibility and catering to their audience’s desire. Usher (2013, p. 343) explores web metrics within the financial context of the news outlet; for AJE, as a company where only the top tier of management is privy to the financial state of the company,
web metrics assumed a more backseat role and journalists did not alter their editorial judgements based on the metrics of certain news items. However, Usher (2013, p. 348) questions whether the demise of news’ traditional economic model and the range of consumer choices for news consumption will lead other news outlets to place audience feedback more centrally in the process of deciding news coverage. Usher’s (2013) research was published a mere six years ago, yet the digital landscape has shifted significantly in the interim. Since then, as argued by Zamith (2018, p. 429) in accordance with Usher’s (2013) prediction, a backdrop of uncertainty within journalism has led news outlets to increasingly consider audience metrics in news production. Moreover, research into Australian news outlets conducted by Hanusch and Tandoc (2017, p. 2) found that audience feedback such as reader comments and social media engagement influenced the self-perceptions of journalists, in turn shaping what they thought audiences expect from their output.
The branch of journalism studies concerned with the ever-evolving relationship between the news industry and technological advances seems to adhere to a certain format. These studies tend to take traditional journalistic terminology and update them to fit with research in the social media age. In doing so, these papers do not seem to be equipped with the correct terminology to fully encompass the influence of platforms over journalism. For instance, Tandoc and Maitra (2017, p. 1683) apply Bourdieu's field theory to the current journalistic climate, showing that the journalistic field is increasingly heteronomous in the digitized age. This terminology is useful: it allows the researchers to envision Facebook and other platforms as external agents exercising influence over the journalistic field through changes such as algorithmic tweaks (Tandoc and Maitra, 2017). However, it does not quite capture why or how platforms hold so much influence on the journalistic field. Turning towards Araujo and van der Meer’s (2018) research into news values on social media also highlights the lack of technicity within journalism research focusing on platforms. Araujo and van der Meer’s (2018) research focused on finding the factors that increase online attention for news stories on Twitter, paying particular attention to how actors can shape the virality of news. Araujo and van der Meer (2018, p. 1) found that influential actors, such as politicians and journalists, do hold influence over news sharing in the Twitter sphere and can positively affect a story’s virality. However, Araujo and van der Meer (2018) also seem to miss the role of the platform itself in influencing the virality of news in the Twitter sphere. As suggested by Carlson (2018, p. 1767), journalistic judgement has become fraught in the wake of algorithmic selection as newsworthiness is replaced by personalization, leading him to argue that attention needs to be given to how algorithmic judgment alters news production, which this thesis seeks to do in the context of a specific platform.
Many of the papers within this branch of journalism studies may therefore benefit from borrowing the vernacular and practices of software studies when considering the technicity of the platforms that news outlets have come to rely on. For instance, as argued by the new media theorists Niederer and Van Dijck (2010, p. 1376), non-human entities can count as actors, and therefore the objects and devices used to share news can be conceptualised as crucially impacting its circulation in collaboration with human actors. This also allows for social media platforms to be conceived as economic actors, opening up the possibility to question their business motivations, design choices and algorithmic practices. As Zamith (2018, p. 431) remarks, “what moral obligations are owed to citizens by the creators of those algorithms and the news organizations that employ them?”—this question can only be answered if the technology underpinning news production can be opened up and examined. Therefore, whilst current journalism studies research provides useful groundwork for the shaping of journalism by metrics, audience data and the proliferation of social media, this research could benefit from an added lens in order to envision platforms as more than mere distribution channels. This lens is that of platformization, a well-researched phenomenon within software studies, which allows for platforms to be considered as techno-commercial systems. Platformization research allows for the recognition that business models, algorithmic design and interface choices play a role in the circulation of news content. Therefore, to truly understand how platforms shape news production, this thesis will now critically engage with the literature of platformization found within software studies.
1.2 Software studies: how platforms structure information
To answer the research question of this thesis, concerned with how Instagram shapes the content shared by news outlets, it is important to engage with the current literature surrounding how platforms influence the ways that information is circulated through their infrastructure. One area of research into this phenomenon is software studies, based under the umbrella of new media research. The journalism studies literature discussed above lacks depth of examination into the platform themselves, focusing on how platforms influence news production whilst struggling to adapt traditional media concepts to the new technological configurations of the platform landscape (Rieder and Sire, 2014, p. 196). The acceptance of platforms at face value downplays their role in structuring, organising and channelling information (Gillespie, 2017). This is what platform businesses want; as Gillespie (2010, p. 349) argues, the term ‘platform’ is a structural metaphor that discursively positions platform businesses as impartial conduits—appealing to users, advertisers and clients, yet able to avoid liability for user activity and evade government regulation.
The rise of platforms means it is especially important to pick them apart. As pointed out by Helmond (2015a, p. 1), platforms are a relatively new feature of the Internet landscape, yet they are the dominant infrastructure of the social web. Platforms with the largest user bases hold extensive reach and power, dominating digital interactions and profoundly changing our daily lives (Manjoo, 2016; Van Dijck et al., 2018, p. 2). These platforms have become integral to online activity, making them difficult for institutions and industries to ignore. When outside institutions and industries engage with platforms, attracted by their large user bases, they are inevitably pulled in to the logic of the platform ecosystem and must adapt to the economic, governmental and infrastructural rules of the platform (Nieborg and Poell, 2018, p. 4276). This phenomenon is platformization: “the penetration of economic and infrastructural extensions of online platforms into the web, affecting the production, distribution, and circulation of cultural content” (Nieborg and Poell, 2018, p. 4275). It is important to engage with literature on platformization in light of the research question to truly understand the transformative capacities of platforms for all users—which includes institutions and organisations as well as everyday citizens.
To question how platforms structure content, it is important to understand the business models that motivate their decisions. Platforms are strategic and economic actors: as highlighted by Gillespie (2015, p. 1), they select and assemble user content in ways that suit their commercial aims. To unearth these economic objectives, software studies research draws upon political economics to create a generalised picture of a platform’s underlying qualities. Platforms distribute interfaces and users globally, then bring together distinct groups of end-users through a common infrastructure; they position themselves as intermediaries and act as multi-sided markets (Srnicek, 2017, p. 31; Rieder and Sire, 2014, p. 199; Bratton, 2015, p. 42). This structure entails an economic reorganisation of the media landscape that news outlets are used to navigating, as traditionally they operate as two-sided markets, connecting their audience with advertisers (Van Dijck et al., 2018, p. 59). Social media platforms position themselves as the intermediate space where users can follow, share and interact with friends, celebrities, brands and advertisers. Once positioned between different user groups, platforms can record interactions; human emotions are simplified into clickable buttons such as ‘like’ and ‘share’ and user interaction with the interface is turned into data (Srnicek, 2017, p. 23).
The vast dataset created by recording user interactions is vital to how platforms make profits. As multi-sided markets, platforms rely on the characteristic of network effects: the more users a platform amasses, the more valuable the platform becomes for other users within the same group (direct effects) and for other user groups (indirect effects) (Srnicek, 2017, p. 53; Nieborg and Poell, 2018, p. 4287). Amassing a large quantity of engaged users, whose actions are converted into data points, means the platform attracts even more users and has more appeal to advertisers—and can
subsequently profit from this matching process, for instance, it is estimated that Instagram’s revenue was $8-$9 billion in 2018 (Rieder and Sire, 2014, p. 199; Wagner and Molla, 2018). The platform becomes appealing to advertisers not only through the number of ‘eyeballs’ an advertiser can reach through placing an advertisement on that platform but also because a platform with a larger data set is better at targeting the correct users for that advert; therefore, advertisers are drawn to larger platforms and will invest more in advertising there (Srnicek, 2017, p. 31). As social media platforms are techno-commercial systems, they entwine technological choices with commercial aims when choosing how to structure content (Helmond, 2015a, p. 2). For instance, data collected from users can be used to structure platform environments in subtly persuasive and irresistible ways that suit the platform’s business aims, such as encouraging users to spend more time on the platform or click an advertiser’s link (Yeung, 2017, p. 131).
Platforms use algorithms based on their vast datasets to structure user content and circulate information. As examined by Gillespie (2014, p. 167), algorithms are procedures that turn data into a desired output; they are the operations executed on data (Bucher, 2018, p. 22). Algorithms distribute ways of seeing, for instance, algorithms structure the user-generated content that one sees upon opening their social media apps and scrolling through their home feeds (Bucher, 2018, p. 66). The algorithmic selection of a user’s feed is important; whereas many social media platforms previously presented end-users with reverse-chronological timelines of content from other users they follow, many have moved towards explicitly algorithmically-selected feeds that organise content in relation to user activities and advertising demands—including Instagram (Kiberd, 2016; Bucher and Helmond, 2017, p. 259; Rieder and Sire, 2014, p. 198). In Bucher’s (2012, p. 1168) exploration of Facebook’s news feed, she argues that algorithmic selection is used to determine content visibility; the algorithm is programmed so that content that receives more engagement from users is placed higher in the feeds of other users, increasing the likeliness that these other users will see it—and content that garners less engagement receives less visibility. As Rieder and Sire (2014, p. 203) point out in regards to Google, there is no search without systematic bias—search engines are supposed to index and rank content, and algorithms are designed to favour content in certain ways. The same is true for social media platforms; algorithmic feeds are supposed to rank content, consequently making some items more visible than others. However, it is important to remember that platform users do not exist in a vacuum: users are citizens, participants in public life, and therefore the information that users receive online affects their interactions within the offline world too. Therefore, algorithmic choices are political because they make the world appear in certain ways (Bucher, 2018, p. 3).
Gillespie (2014, p. 187) argues that algorithmic logic not only shapes user practices but also leads users to internalise the platform’s norms and priorities; if news outlets are considered as platform users, one can ask how they
might internalise platform values. Drawing upon the journalism studies research explored earlier, publishers seem to internalise the platform’s priorities in the hope of reaching new audiences —for instance, by sharing more surprising content or adjusting their content to suit the platform’s algorithmic tweaks (Lischka, 2018; Tandoc and Maitra, 2018). Gillespie (2014, p. 168) calls this “entanglement with practice”, where actors reshape their practice to suit the algorithms they depend on. For publishers, understanding the algorithms that structure and share their content to audiences constitutes a kind of power: knowing the right sort of content to share, or how to share it, leads to increased visibility and opportunities. If a news outlet cannot garner enough attention from their audience then they face the possibility of effectively having their content hidden on the platform, placed at the bottom of user feeds and therefore less likely to be seen; this “threat of invisibility” encourages the normalization of certain behaviours and content (Bucher, 2012, p. 171). Therefore, although long-standing worries for the personalization of news are indeed valid, perhaps a slightly different angle should be employed for this research, questioning the conformity of news outlets to the rules of platforms, asking how they adapt their output in order to gain visibility and how this might affect the production of a diverse news sphere.
There is a small body of software studies research focusing on relationships between media organisations and platform intermediaries, for instance, Nielsen and Ganter’s (2018) case study of a large European news outlet. Their study found that the news outlet experienced tension between the short-term operational opportunities afforded by platforms and the long-term strategic worries about dependence on platforms (Nielsen and Ganter, 2018, p. 1600). They found that, although news outlets have historically possessed more control over their channels of communication and have derived much of their power and profits from this control, much of this control has been passed over to platforms in recent years. This mirrors research by Nieborg and Poell (2018, p. 4276), who use the term “platform dependence” to explain the relationship: as publishers turn to platforms to carry out more functions of their business, they relinquish more control to these platforms, interlocking the two parties further. Although digital intermediaries offer opportunities to publishers to reach new audiences, publishers must relinquish control over data, revenues and content as their journalistic output is reduced to singular stories that are adapted for platform distribution (Nieborg and Poell, 2018, p. 4287). Research concerned with the platformization of cultural production is important for this thesis as it emphasises that institutional actors are also platform users and that digital intermediaries control the media environment for these actors as well as everyday citizens.
1.3 Instagram studies: the gap in knowledge
This chapter so far highlights a gap in knowledge regarding Instagram’s role as a techno-commercial system in shaping the content shared by news outlets on the platform. Within journalism studies, research mostly focuses on the various ways that news outlets are adapting to social media platforms, yet fails to account for the role and governance of the platforms in shaping how news outlets use it. Turning to the field of software studies within new media research, it becomes possible to consider this depth through analysis of platform business models and algorithms, yet there is only a small body of research situating these findings in the context of news production and very little work focusing on the platform of Instagram. This is particularly interesting when considering that Instagram is a service larger than Snapchat and Twitter combined, with over a billion monthly active users and 500 million checking the app on a daily basis (“Our Story”, n.d.). Analysis of current academic research, conducted by Kümpel, Karnowski, and Keyling (2015, p. 9), found that there is a Twitter-centric bias within news sharing research and, despite the fact that Instagram has a considerably larger user base than Twitter, it has a comparatively smaller corpus of research. This Twitter-centric bias is further displayed in a tweet shared by media researcher Nielsen (2019) comparing platform user base sizes to the number of papers at the 2019 International Communication Association conference that mention them. Twitter, with a user base of 321 million, received 83 mentions; Facebook, with 2.4 billion, received 67; WhatsApp, with 1.5 billion, received seven; and Instagram, with one billion, received 35 —leading Nielsen (2019) to describe researchers as “going where data is”. Not only is data more difficult to obtain on Instagram than Twitter, there is an added difficulty to analysing the visual data collected from Instagram in comparison to the automated analysis of textual social media afforded by Twitter (Highfield and Leaver, 2014). As argued by Highfield and Leaver (2016, p. 48), visual social media content documents everything from food and selfies to political views and important information, and requires a deeper level of individual interpretation than its textual counterparts.
Within the limited corpus of new media research on Instagram, the literature focuses on user practices for sharing specific personal experiences and performance of the self (e.g. Ging and Garvey, 2017; Leaver and Highfield, 2018; Baker and Walsh, 2018). As this paper is concerned with the use of Instagram by institutional actors, there is a small body of related work focused on political actors on Instagram to draw upon (e.g. O’Connell, 2018; Filimonov, Russmann, and Svensson, 2016; Larsson, 2017). These studies mostly focus on content analysis, finding that politicians use Instagram to broadcast campaign messages, mobilise supporters and appeal to voters. In O’Connell’s (2018, p. 15) analysis of how US Congress members perform the professional self on Instagram, he came across the phenomenon of surrogate representation, where users follow congress members because they enjoy their posts rather
than because they represent their local area. A similar notion can be applied to the topic of this thesis; the newspapers chosen are traditionally UK-based but are granted access to an international audience through Instagram’s global user base. Therefore, readers from around the world have the opportunity to follow these UK news outlets if they enjoy their posts.
In the context of this thesis, which is concerned with turning attention both to Instagram usage by news outlets and how this usage might be shaped by the platform, perhaps the most interesting piece of research on Instagram comes from Cotter (2019), which intertwines user practices with algorithmic governmentality. Cotter’s (2019, p. 898) research is concerned with how Instagram influencers interpret the platform’s algorithmic architecture, specifically in the period after Instagram added algorithmic ranking to users’ feeds in 2016, drawing upon Bucher’s (2012, p. 1164) notion of the threat of invisibility. Through analysis of online communication on Facebook groups amongst aspiring and established influencers, Cotter (2019, p. 900) notes that influencers deploy the tactic of “playing the visibility game” to receive higher exposure through algorithmic selection on the platform. Cotter (2019, p. 900) highlights that Instagram is the game master, establishing the rules of the game through algorithmic decisions, but asserts the role of influencers as users in normalising certain behaviours to gain higher exposure. Cotter’s (2019) research serves as a reminder of the power dynamic between users, algorithms and platforms, and it is possible to draw some parallels between influencers and news outlets: both are turning to Instagram to build a large, engaged following, potentially impacting followers’ beliefs if they can attract and maintain their attention. Therefore, Cotter’s (2019) theory of playing the visibility game will provide useful groundwork for analysing trends within Instagram use by news outlets. However, although some parallels between the actors can be drawn and the focus on algorithmic architecture aligns Cotter’s (2019) work with this thesis, her research focuses on individual users as opposed to institutional actors. Exploring Instagram use by news outlets provides an extra dimension in the form of journalistic ethics and practice; if journalism is tasked with speaking truth to power, how do news outlets adapt to algorithmic governmentality?
It is also important to note that most literature focusing on Instagram has failed to account for its stories element when conducting research. Stories is a feature of the platform where users can upload photos and videos from their daily lives, creating a slideshow of content that disappears 24 hours after posting (Poulsen, 2018, p. 129). The feature has grown distinctly in popularity since its launch in 2016 and has over 500 million daily users as of January 2019 (Constine, 2019). Many users now prefer to share content through the ephemeral stories feature rather than the archival permanence of posting; Facebook has announced that stories will surpass feeds as the main way that users will
share with their friends in 2019 across all Facebook products —which includes Instagram (Constine, 2018a). With this in mind, failing to account for stories within Instagram research only grants a partial view into the phenomenon that is at stake. For instance, copying Filimonov et al.’s (2016) methodology for researching election campaigning on Instagram in the present day would not capture how rising politicians such as congressional representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez used stories to capture an audience and inspire voters in the 2016 US election (Cauterucci, 2018). As explored by Haber (2019, p. 3), the question of how to study the temporal is a long-standing problem for Internet archivists, but has been made increasingly difficult with the advent of ephemeral content on platforms. Ephemeral and non-archival features like stories are the latest hurdle to platform research, as will be discussed in the upcoming methodology section. This thesis actively chooses to include stories content within its dataset to create a richer understanding of Instagram use by news outlets and to consider how different platform features shape content sharing.
Through critically engaging with Instagram research, the gap in knowledge at the intersection of platform governance, news outlets as users, and Instagram as a site of research is highlighted. Instagram is an important site of study due to its growing prominence within the platform landscape, alongside recent research suggesting that publishers are diversifying away from Facebook and towards Instagram (Newman, 2019, p. 17). Moreover, as Instagram is owned by Facebook and increasingly makes decisions under its parent company’s watch, Instagram research can open up new questions for Facebook’s dominance over the social media landscape (Gibbs, Lyons and Solon, 2018). As more users consume their news through image-focused, algorithmically selected content, concerns regarding the production of a well-informed public through the circulation of information are once again brought to the forefront. This thesis seeks to gain insight into this phenomenon and its consequences by looking further than just the content shared by the news outlets, turning towards the infrastructural platform choices that underpin these sharing practices.
This chapter has conducted a critical analysis of the available literature pertaining to the problem that the content shared by news outlets on Instagram seems to be shaped by something other than journalistic editing practices. Through an exploration of journalism studies literature, the common notion that technology shapes journalism is grounded in an analysis of publishers, platforms and audience metrics. However, whilst journalism studies research does suggest that this thesis will find that the news outlets’ Instagram usage is shaped by user reactions to content, the research fails to engage with the technicity of social media platforms. Therefore, this thesis will not just utilise the audience metrics that can be harvested from Instagram, it will seek to engage with these metrics through the
lens of platformization: the affordances, interface choices, algorithmic selection and political economy of platforms as techno-commercial systems. The related literature from software studies argues that platforms pull outside institutions into their infrastructure and reshape them in their image, yet there is very little work within this branch of study that links news production with Instagram. The relationship between news outlets and Instagram is important to study from this angle not only due to Instagram’s rising prominence, but also because Instagram’s rigid formatting constraints constitute very different dimensions to traditional journalistic format. This research will therefore operationalise the literature of platformization in the context of Instagram, considering how content shared by the chosen news outlets are constrained by Instagram’s infrastructure, algorithmic decisions and underlying business strategies. There is also a gap within Instagram research focusing on ephemeral content; therefore, this research will also seek to understand Instagram stories, asking why news outlets would turn to it and why platforms might want to encourage engagement with this particular type of content.
Chapter 2. Building a rounded methodology for Instagram research
This chapter outlines the methodology for researching how Instagram as a techno-commercial system shapes content shared by news outlets. In a similar vein to the journalism and Instagram research discussed above that focuses on sharing practices, content and metrics from an Instagram scraper will be operationalized. However, to situate this literature amongst the body of software studies research tasked with opening up the underlying structures of the platform landscape, this thesis must look further than content alone and perform exploratory research into Instagram’s affordances, algorithmic selection and interface design. Moreover, this research attempts to address the gap in knowledge regarding ephemeral content on the platform, therefore, a methodology for collecting and analysing ephemeral data from the news outlets must be constructed.
2.1 Narrowing the research focus
Many of the journalism studies papers explored in the previous chapter highlight the growing concern regarding Facebook’s influence over the news industry (Lischka, 2018; Carlson, 2018; Tandoc and Maitra, 2018). Facebook also has power beyond the individual platform, as it owns the mobile messaging service WhatsApp, Instagram and a host of other companies (Bell and Owen, 2017, p. 19). Instagram and WhatsApp have recently received press exposure due to worries they are conducting business under increasing control from Facebook, sparked by the decision of both Instagram and WhatsApp’s founders to leave their companies, as well as plans to merge the messaging features of these two platforms and their parent company (Greer, 2018; Hern, 2019). As explored in the previous chapter, Instagram is a platform of growing prominence, yet it is an under-utilised and interesting site for research into news sharing practices and its techno-commercial underpinnings. One of its defining features is its popularity with young social media users —a 2019 report from Statista stated that 32% of users on the platform are between the ages of 18-24 (“Distribution of Instagram users”, 2019). When adding the higher age bracket of 25-34, 65% of the platform’s total user base is accounted for (“Distribution of Instagram users”, 2019). Turning towards the news industry, recent research has found that news outlets are seeking to diversify away from Facebook, and many are particularly excited by the prospects of Instagram (Newman, 2019, p. 17). This is because Instagram’s user base constitutes a large number of new readers for many outlets, as explained by BBC News’ social media editor: “this audience is on Instagram first… this is an opportunity to reach an audience that otherwise wouldn’t consume our content, while boosting referral traffic” (Southern, 2018). The recent shift by news outlets towards Instagram justifies the decision for this research to focus
on the platform; to understand Facebook’s dominance over the news industry, it is important to gain knowledge of how the companies that Facebook owns also shape the circulation of journalistic content.
With Instagram designated as a site of research, this thesis aims to understand how news outlets use the platform to share journalistic content and connect with new audiences and to uncover Instagram’s role as a techno-commercial system in shaping this content. The first step was therefore to designate a selection of news outlets to focus on. It was important that the news outlets chosen for this study constituted a body of outside actors that are pulled in to the platform infrastructure and reshaped in the platform’s image (Van Dijck et al., 2018, p. 64). The decision was made to select a particular country, adding a geographical focus to a national news industry’s relationship with the platform. As explored in the previous chapter, there is a fairly large cohort of recent research across journalism and new media studies that focuses on the relationship between publishers and platforms, but little of this research focuses on the United Kingdom, a country with a distinct set of news media institutions and where 55% of adults recently surveyed by the Pew Research Center say they consume news on social media (Mitchell et al., 2018, p. 43). The UK was chosen as a site of research due to its tumultuous recent history of tension between digital platforms, news publishers, democracy and politics, with Facebook in particular being held to account for its role in targeted advertising and the spread of disinformation during the country’s 2016 European Union membership referendum (Cadwalladr, 2019). In February 2019, an independent UK government review into the sustainability of high-quality journalism was published, highlighting concerns about the effects of digital platforms on the news industry and wider public discourse and arguing that a drastic rebalance in the relationship between platforms and news publishers was needed (Cairncross, 2019, p. 91). The heightened interest in the dynamics of the UK news industry in the age of platforms adds weight to the decision to focus on the country.
2.2 Selecting accounts
With the platform-specific and geographical focus in place, the next step was to designate the specific news outlets and their corresponding Instagram accounts. The decision was made to focus on the Instagram presence of prominent UK news outlets, as opposed to smaller or niche outlets, as this research is concerned with the sharing practices of news outlets as established actors and the restructured media environment they work in due to the rise of digital intermediaries (Nielsen and Ganter, 2018, p. 1604). This reasoning is also why the dataset was built using data from specific accounts, rather than platform-wide content with certain hashtags. As explained by Filimonov et al. (2016, p. 4), an Instagram account consists of the user’s page and their posts; as this research is concerned with expanding
Instagram research to document ephemeral sharing, the concept of an account is extended to also include stories content shared by the user.
To delimit the corpus, this research turned towards a 2018 report from the Pew Research Center (henceforth referred to as Pew) into news media attitudes and habits across Western Europe (Mitchell et al., 2018). Pew is a US-based nonpartisan fact tank, with a large cohort of expert staff, therefore it was deemed to be a trustworthy source (“About Pew Research Center”, n.d.). Their research focused on eight UK-based news outlets, and their selection process for choosing these outlets focused on finding well-known outlets that captured a broad range of publishing types (for example print or TV), funding sources, audience size and political bias (Mitchell et al., 2018, p. 56). Pew’s goal in choosing these outlets strongly reflects the goal of this research to capture a range of prominent news outlets from across the UK news industry. In addition, Pew undertook a meticulous selection process, utilising audience data from trusted online sources, consulting subject experts for advice, and conducting focus groups (Mitchell et al., 2018, p. 56). These eight outlets all have an active Instagram presence, therefore the decision to focus on the same eight accounts was justified due to the extensive nature of Pew’s selection process and the shared goals of both studies.
News outlet Instagram statistics Additional information
Username Followers Political leaning Publisher type BBC News @bbcnews 7.8m Left-Center Television/radio broadcaster Daily Mail @dailymail 828k Questionable Source Daily newspaper
Daily Mirror @dailymirror 147k Left Daily newspaper
The Guardian @guardian 1.7m Left-Center Daily newspaper
HuffPost UK @huffpostuk 47.3k Left Digital
ITV News @itvnews 228k Right-Center Television broadcaster
Sky News @skynews 575k Left-Center Television broadcaster
The Times @thetimes 192k Right-Center Daily newspaper
Table 1: The eight chosen news outlets, their Instagram data and additional information.
The eight news outlets, as well as Instagram statistics and additional information, can be seen in Table 1. When viewing a user’s Instagram profile, the number of users that follow the account is designated in terms of ‘followers’; the number of other users that the account follows can also be seen via their ‘following’ count. The username and follower count of the eight outlets were collected on 3 April 2019. To add political context for readers unfamiliar with the UK news industry, the eight outlets have also been classified by their political leaning and publisher type. These additional classifications were extracted from Media Bias/Fact Check (MBFC), an independent online media outlet that aims to educate the public on media bias (“About | MBFC”, n.d.). It is important to note that MBFC’s calculation of political leanings is somewhat subjective by their own admission (“Methodology | MBFC”, n.d.). However, as the purpose of this data is purely to add context to the state of the UK news industry, and there is a distinct lack of reliable alternative sources, MBFC’s classifications—a scale of political leanings from left to right—were deemed appropriate for inclusion in the table.
The news outlet with the largest Instagram following is BBC News, Britain’s public broadcaster, which is funded by consumer licence fees and is free to access (“BBC | MBFC”, n.d.). As uncovered in Pew’s report, 48% of the UK population consider the BBC to be their main source of news (Mitchell et al., 2018, p. 9). The Instagram account with the second-largest following belongs to The Guardian, an editorially independent newspaper with a large international reach. The Guardian seeks to establish a sustainable future for its left-leaning journalism through reader 1 contributions, as opposed to concealing content behind a paywall (Waterson, 2018). Two tabloid-style papers are also included in the chosen outlets, the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror, occupying opposite ends of MBFC political bias spectrum. Notably, the Daily Mail, which has the third-largest following out of the selected accounts, is designated as a questionable source by MBFC, meaning that it is characterised as showing extreme bias or a lack of transparency (“Daily Mail | MBFC”, n.d.). Two privately-owned television broadcast outlets, ITV News and Sky News, both host a moderate follower count and occupy positions of slight political leaning by MBFC’s calculations. The Times is the only outlet within the selection that restricts access to its content through the use of a paywall. These 2 seven news outlets constitute digitised objects, which Rogers (2013, p. 19) defines as items that have ‘migrated’ to the Internet, meaning they have an established presence within a prior medium format. In contrast, Rogers (2013, p. 19) characterises objects and content that are ‘born’ on the Internet as natively digital. The one natively digital outlet within this study, HuffPost UK, has the smallest follower count. Launched in 2011, HuffPost UK is an international
1 According to Alexa’s traffic rank, determined by average daily visitors and page views, The Guardian is the fifth
highest-ranked news site worldwide, placing just behind Google News. Source: https://www.alexa.com/topsites/category/News.
branch of the US-based Huffington Post (Barnett, 2011). As Huffington Post and HuffPost UK have separate websites and Instagram accounts, the decision was made to focus on the UK-specific site and Instagram account due to the geographical focus of this thesis.
Once the eight outlets had been selected, a time frame for collecting data was designated. This time frame needed to be in the future, as ephemeral content shared as stories could not be collected retrospectively. The time frame needed to allow different news items to arise, whilst also creating a manageable dataset for (partial) manual collection, categorisation and analysis. When undertaking preliminary research, it was found that some accounts uploaded multiple posts and stories every day, whereas others shared content slightly more sparingly. Based on this initial research, it was estimated that a one-week time frame (Monday to Sunday) would return approximately 400 data points, which seemed to be a feasible size for the manual processes involved whilst also allowing for different trends to arise. The week chosen for conducting this research was 18 to 24 February 2019, and many political events occurred during this time period. In the UK, many elected MPs left the Labour Party to form an independent political group, a young British girl groomed by ISIS had her UK citizenship revoked by the home secretary, and voting on Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit deal was further delayed. Across the globe, Democrat Bernie Sanders announced his run for the US 2020 election, a fire in Bangladesh’s capital city killed at least 78 people, and iconic fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld passed away. This week resulted in a dataset of 424 items of content that could be analysed for sharing practices and norms of use. Undertaking a week-long analysis also matched the time frame chosen by the Tow Journalism Center for their multi-year investigation into platform use by US news media, adding further weight that this time frame would produce a viable dataset (Rashidian, Brown, Hansen, Bell, and Albright, 2019, p. 6). It should be noted that the Tow Journalism Center repeated their week-long analysis across multiple platforms every few months over the course of three years to track the evolution of the relationship between publishers and platforms. However, as this thesis is concerned with uncovering the current sharing practices of UK news outlets on Instagram, repeating the experiment was not deemed to be necessary. However, repeating the methodology of this thesis in future studies could be an interesting angle for further research, particularly if the UK government chooses to follow the advice of Cairncross’ (2019) government report and exert regulation over social media platforms.
2.3 Data collection
This thesis aims to repurpose Instagram content and metrics for research to understand how content shared by UK news outlets on Instagram may be shaped by the platform’s constraints. This is a tactic of digital methods, a term used
by Rogers (2013) to describe a form of Internet research that “learns from the methods of online devices, repurposes them, and seeks to ground claims about cultural change and societal conditions in web data” (p. 19). Content shared by news outlets on Instagram is natively digital, it is ‘born’ on Instagram’s platform (Rogers, 2013, p. 19); this thesis uses digital methods to extract and interpret this data, examining Instagram’s role in shaping the circulation of information. The dataset for this thesis is extracted from posts and stories shared by the eight designated Instagram accounts over a week-long time period. A post on an Instagram account is described by Filimonov et al. (2016, p. 4) as a picture or video that has been uploaded by the user and may additionally include a user-written caption to label or describe the accompanying image or video. Instagram’s platform constraints mean that a non-textual element (i.e. a photo or a video) must be uploaded to share a post (Filimonov et al., 2016, p. 4). It is not necessary for the user to add a textual element (i.e. a caption) to share content on the platform, however, this research will also examine the accompanying captions to contextualise the shared photos (Filimonov et al., 2016, p. 4; Highfield and Leaver, 2016, p. 51). Journalism is historically grounded in the printed word, therefore, the visual emphasis encouraged by Instagram’s infrastructural choices is important to note. The platform necessitates that users upload an image or video when sharing on the platform, and additional wording in the form of captions is merely an optional extra. This further heightens Instagram as an interesting site of research; in comparison, many other social media platforms such as Twitter are primarily textual (Highfield and Leaver, 2016, p. 47).
The Digital Methods Initiative’s Instagram Scraper was used to collect post data from each of the eight Instagram accounts. Conceived in Amsterdam in 2007, the Digital Methods Initiative is an Internet Studies research group that focuses on creating methods and tools for online social and political research (Rogers, 2013, p. 7; “The Digital Methods Initiative - About Us”, n.d.). Scrapers automate the collection of information from a designated online source and are usually tailored for the specific dimensions of the site; the Instagram Scraper tool utilises Instagram’s API to retrieve post data for specific users, hashtags, or locations (Weltevrede, 2016, p. 30; “Instagram Scraper”, n.d.). Upon launching the Instagram Scraper, the user tailors their scrape through a series of inputs; the first is a drop-down list to select a query mode, designating which aspect of Instagram the tool will scrape for data. The option chosen was ‘user names’ as this research is concerned with the posts shared by news outlets as Instagram users, as opposed to posts shared with a particular hashtag or a certain location. The second input required is the user names themselves, manually typed into a text box. The scrape is then queued and completed, and the resulting file is logged in the ‘output’ menu at the top of the screen. The scrape was conducted on 5 March 2019, and the resulting file was downloaded as a CSV, then imported to Google Sheets, where the CSV file is automatically parsed into a spreadsheet
