“You've Got To Read This!”—Understanding News Sharing Through A Mixed-Methods Analysis of Most Shared News Stories on Reddit

“You've Got To Read This!”—Understanding News Sharing Through A Mixed-Methods Analysis of Most Shared News Stories on Reddit

Bob Heurman (2974932) University of Groningen Course: Master’s Thesis

Tutors: prof. dr. Marcel Broersma & dr. Ansgard Heinrich Supervisor: Chrysi Dagoula, PhD

Date: 29-10-2020

Word count: 21.534

II Literature Review ... 6

II.I From Contributor to Active Distributor ... 6

II.II The Platformised Society ... 9

II.III News Sharing on Social Media ... 12

III Method ... 15

III.I Data Collection ... 15

III.II Data Analysis ... 17

IV Results... 19

IV.I Most Shared News Stories ... 19

IV.II Division of News Topics and News Organisations ... 27

IV.III Most Actively Engaged News Stories ... 32

V Discussion ... 38

V.I Characteristics of Most Shared News Stories ... 38

V.II Successful News Organisations ... 38

V.III Differences Between Passively and Actively Engaged News Stories ... 39

V.IV Viral Redditors ... 41

VI Conclusion ... 44

VII References ... 48

VIII Appendices ... 53

VIII.I Codebook and Coding Sheet ... 53

VIII.II Dataset Table ... 57

VIII.III Dataset List of Links ... 76

Tables Table 1 The top ten most shared (upvoted) news stories on Reddit... 24

Table 2 News topic division among the top ... 27

Table 3 The news organisations behind the top 100 most shared news stories on Reddit— sorted by news organisation frequency... 29

Table 4 The fourteen news organisations behind 58% of the top 100 most shared news stories on Reddit. Sorted by news topic, from most to least contributions.. ... 31

Table 5 The top ten most actively engaged (commented) news stories on Reddit. ... 36

Bob Heurman

Our news habits are increasingly impacted by news sharing on a variety of social media platforms. Yet, we know very little as to what popularises news in such settings.

The current study serves to broaden and deepen the existing academic literature and professional knowledge pertaining to the notion of news distribution through a mixed- methods analysis of most shared news stories on Reddit—a relatively underexplored social media platform in a field that predominantly focuses on Facebook and Twitter.

The findings show that political, social and economic news topics that have the United States or its president Donald Trump at its core characterise the most frequently (re)distributed and actively engaged stories on Reddit, and that the news organisations that adhere to these characteristics as well as the sociodemographics of Reddit’s userbase are the most successful in going viral. The findings further suggest that news organisations ought to change their headline based on the type of user involvement they are after, with shorter headlines stimulating deliberation and longer headlines promoting distribution.

Lastly, the current research finds that users—like (political) news stories and the organisations behind such stories—can go viral on social media platforms. Three specific Redditors, who are collectively responsible for 11% of the entire sample, show signs of a clear news-sharing strategy by exclusively sharing stories pertaining to the aforementioned three most popular news topic categories and by demonstrating a clear preference for longer titles of Reddit submissions, which in their case is often achieved by means of adding a quote from the news organisation’s article to the original headline.

K

Reddit; news; news sharing; social media; user involvement

I Introduction

News sharing can be understood as an inherent human activity (Kalsnes & Larsson, 2018); an activity that is not native to the digital platforms used for this purpose today (Hermida et al., 2012). Indeed, previous research found news sharing to take place in offline communities as well (McCollough et al., 2017; Boczkowski, 2010). True as that may be, the internet has been providing new opportunities. Singer et al. (2011) maintained that digital technology has not only sped up the production of news but also its distribution, with news websites providing ways for its readers to easily share articles on social media.

Social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, make up an increasingly large chunk of news consumers’ media repertoires (Swart, Peters & Broersma, 2019); something which is also reflected in the latest digital news report by Reuters, more than half of the respondents of which prefer social media, search engines or news aggregators as ways of accessing the news (Newman et al., 2019). In addition to speeding up the workings of the news industry, digital technology—social media platforms in particular—have visualised and quantified news sharing, for shared news articles now find their way into our personal social media feeds and for they are accompanied by different forms of metadata (Kalsnes &

Larsson, 2018)—like the engagement-depicting upvotes and comments that are central to this thesis.

The implications of news-sharing practices go beyond potentially growing audience engagement. Olmstead et al. (2011) suggested that “understanding not only what content users will want to consume but also what content they are likely to pass along may be a key to how stories are put together and even what stories get covered in the first place” (p. 1). The sharing of news and the resulting interplay between the editorial and social media—between established actors and their amateur equivalent—characterises Chadwick’s (2013) hybrid media system. Additionally, as sharing practices come to impact the news itself (Cherubini &

Nielsen, 2016), questions are raised over the ethics of using web analytics as, now that it is clearer than ever which stories do well in terms of reach and which do not, journalists may start exclusively writing what the public is interested in instead of what is of interest to the public (Tandoc Jr. & Thomas, 2015).

Given news sharing’s crucial relevance, Kalsnes & Larsson (2018) argued that

“existing research does not sufficiently cover what characterizes news sharing outside an Anglo-American context, spanning different social platforms, or relating to news emanating from different media outlets” (p. 1670). Whereas their study provided an original angle by departing from the Anglo-American context in favour of a Norwegian one, the current thesis seeks to assess an up until now relatively underexplored social media platform: Reddit—

"front page of the internet” (Widman, 2020). This take provides a welcome contrast to a field dominated by research focused on Facebook & Twitter (Kalsnes & Larsson, 2018). Despite Reddit’s over one billion monthly visits (Clement, 2020), a keyword-guided search on Taylor

& Francis Online for literature from Digital Journalism, the leading academic outlet for advancing research into digital journalism studies, returned 28, 263 and 283 results for Reddit, Twitter and Facebook respectively.

Not only does the popular internet forum present itself as particularly interesting to study based on previous research—or rather a lack thereof—but it also sets itself apart from other social media platforms in two distinct ways: users, called Redditors, remain anonymous and the platform is based around communities, which can be moderated, rather than people.

Thus, Reddit, as one of the most successful internet forums, makes for a particularly

interesting social media platform to study news sharing in an, in this case, Anglo-American context.

The current study, motivated by a need to go beyond merely assessing the types of

features made available by news organisations online (Karlsson et al, 2015; Karlsson &

Clerwall, 2013; Steensen, 2011), focuses on how sharing takes place largely outside news organisations’ provided sharing infrastructure. While some US-based news organisations have Reddit sharing buttons provided on their websites, this is, by and large, still missing from websites of news organisations located elsewhere (e.g. BBC and Süddeutsche Zeitung).

As such, this study sets itself apart from earlier research (e.g. Kalsnes & Larsson, 2018) by foregoing the fixation on the provided share and retweet buttons on news organisations’

websites, or the way audience members interact with these, in favour of a wider conception of what is considered news sharing (i.e. that which occurs outside the established

infrastructure).

The research at hand is further motivated by a need to fill the evident research gap identified by Karlsson & Clerwall (2013), who maintained that “few […] studies have

focused solely on audience metrics” (p. 68). Specifically, this research will focus on studying what Lewis & Westlund (2015) deemed “fragments of social and natural activity” (p. 448) and what Meijer & Kormelink (2015) considered “social user practices” (p. 674), which materialises as Reddit traffic data. Consequently, the current thesis pays attention to news content, the organisations behind said content as well as the social media platforms where such content is spread—a relatively unique approach, which cuts across the research subcategories as identified by Kümpel et al. (2015).

Based on the foregoing reasoning, the proposed research questions are inspired by those of Kalsnes & Larsson (2018), who researched news sharing on Facebook and Twitter in a Norwegian context. As such, the following overarching question is suggested: what sorts of stories published by which news organisations are redistributed to comparably higher degrees on Reddit? Further detailing the study, the specific research questions are:

RQ1: Which types of content characterise news stories that are frequently redistributed on Reddit?

RQ2: Which news organisations are comparably most successful in ‘going viral’?

RQ3: What differences can be discerned between the most passively (shared) and actively (commented) engaged news stories on Reddit?

A subsequent discussion of the findings will serve to identify what, if any, differences can be distinguished between the news shared on Reddit compared to the earlier researched

Facebook & Twitter.

II Literature Review

II.I From Contributor to Active Distributor

As briefly discussed in the introduction, news sharing has become part and parcel of online news consumption and distribution (e.g. Himelboim & McCreery, 2012; Hermida et al., 2012). According to Himelboim & McCreery (2012), allowing users to share news items on social networking sites constitutes one of the easiest and cheapest ways to provide

interaction with the journalistic content without sacrificing influence over it. On the receiving end of such interaction, users “said they valued social media because it helped them keep up with events and exposed them to a wider range of news and information” (Hermida et al., 2012, p. 815). Consequently, news stories that are shared a lot online, with some even attaining the coveted status of going ‘viral’, have an impact on journalistic processes and editorial decision making—to the extent that they affect which stories receive any coverage (e.g. Olmstead et al., 2011; Picone, 2016). Thus, audiences, as distributors of news, come to influence the content that characterises news stories, and act as the arbiters of which news organisation’s reach gets to be extended—which relates to the first two research questions.

News sharing on social media platforms can, then, be interpreted in light of the evolving relationship between news organisations and their audiences. It can be seen as allowing a form of participatory media practice to emerge. While the notion of an active or a passive audience has received a considerable amount of attention over the past few years, the relating broader debate has been ongoing for decades (Katz et al., 1973). Since then, discussions have revolved around concepts as Rosen’s (2006) “people formerly known as the audience”, Bruns’ (2010) “produsers” and Marwick and boyd’s (2011) “networked audience”.

Rosen’s (2006) “the people formerly known as the audience” strikes an almost revolutionary tone as it speaks of a rebalance in the means of media production. It is argued that, driven by technological developments, citizens are empowered vis-à-vis the mass media system. For instance, blogs, also called “little First Amendment machines” (Rosen, 2005, Departure section), are thought to rival the media’s printing presses and to extend freedom of the press to those on the formerly receiving end of the media. Podcasting, in turn, is believed to compete with radio stations and their proprietary broadcasting frequencies (Rosen, 2006).

It should be noted that the idea is not to replace the (big) media entirely. Consumers are still happy to go to the theatre for the old style, top-down media consumption instead of storming the stage to put on their own production. However, the former audience refuses to be on the media’s clock any longer. They decide the time, place, application and device of their

engagement, as then CEO of the Associated Press, Tom Curley, explained. Mark Thompson, former Director-General of the BBC and CEO of the New York Times Company, described the people behind the in 2006-ongoing shift as the active audience “who doesn’t want to just sit there but to take part, debate, create, communicate, share” (Rosen, 2006).

Other reasons for the emergence of the hybrid user-producer or “produser”, as Bruns (2010) calls it, entail the shortcomings of mainstream media. For instance, technology news site Slashdot was set up to counter the inability of mainstream media to cover complex specialist topics. Likewise, Independent Media Centres, belonging to Indymedia network, were set up to combat the systematic omission of controversial news for economic or political reasons. In the words of Rushkoff (2003), “as the mainstream mediaspace, particularly in the United States, becomes increasingly centralised and profit-driven, its ability to offer a

multiplicity of perspectives on affairs of global importance is diminished” (p. 17). Citizen

journalism’s purpose, then, is to fill the void left by the mainstream media (Bruns, 2010).

Open news, a term for citizen journalism derived from its open-source brother due to the same industrial-style challenges facing both production models, is described as “an example of how the internet can be used as a democratic medium or innovation commons where users share control over the creation, publication and usage of content” (Platon &

Deuze, 2003, p. 339). Bruns (2010) maintains that in such environments of collaborative content creation, it becomes increasingly difficult to differentiate mere users from producers.

Instead of the traditional distinctions between consumers, distributors and producers, a sliding scale—or spectrum—of user engagement now applies. It is argued that the environment we are entering, which is characterised by inclusivity, equipotentiality,

continuity, and community, is one where users “are always already also producers of content, or indeed have become hybrid produsers” (p. 125).

With the people-formerly-known-as-the-audience’s new producer role comes the development of what Marwick and boyd (2011) considered the networked audience. They maintain that participants in online conversations, much like those taking place in the real world, always have an audience in mind. The goal of this constructed and often imagined audience is for people to present themselves in an appropriate manner, based on their

immediate social context and technological affordances. Indeed, identity-presentation studies on profile-based sites, among which were social network sites, found that people pay

attention to their audience (e.g. Ellison et al., 2006; boyd, 2006)—a process made more difficult by the increasingly popular social media technologies, which collapse different contexts and bring together formerly distinct audiences (Marwick & boyd, 2011).

The networked audience differs in two primary ways from traditional audiences. First, the networked audience allows viewers to create an active, communicative network among themselves (Boase et al., 2006; Haythornthwaite, 2002). Second, and most notably, as opposed to the imagined broadcast audience—which consumes institutionally-produced content and which suffers from limited feedback opportunities—the networked audience can clearly communicate with the speaker using the network (Marwick & boyd, 2011). This important distinction has the potential to influence the way speakers respond and what future content they create. As audience members take turns in producing and creating content, the many-to-many network model constantly recentres on who is replying, responding or talking.

Consequently, social media environments “become a place where person-to-person

conversations take place around user-generated content amidst potentially large audiences”

(Marwick & boyd, 2011, p. 130).

Clearly, Rosen’s (2006) “people formerly known as the audience”, Bruns’ (2010)

“produsers” and Marwick and boyd’s (2011) “networked audience” all concern labels given to previously passive audiences who now have the potential to act as content contributors.

While different in certain aspects, all these conceptualisations involve the blurring of boundaries between the producing role of the professional journalist and the receiving role often associated with the audience. That being said, most empirical research points to, for news consumers, comparatively less taxing forms of engagement through or with the media as being the most alluring (e.g. Larsson, 2012; Karlsson et al., 2015a).

In examining the online newspaper landscape, Larsson (2012) found that most new

mediums adopt the role of cautious traditionalists—which, as the empirical analysis will later

show, they are at least somewhat justified in by virtue of the comparatively lower numbers

pertaining to active engagement. While there have certainly been important changes in the

journalistic process, with increased interaction for audiences (Steensen, 2009; Carpenter,

2010), Larsson (2012) maintains that most journalists take a conservative stance when it comes to increased user interaction. As such, and as mentioned by Singer and Ashman (2009), the profession falls short of being able to call news websites truly ‘shared spaces’.

Larsson (2012) further notes that while opportunities for readers to engage in the journalistic process are increasing, for instance through amending or contributing to the digital news product, few are willing to engage in the more demanding of such features. Instead, “most visitors on newspaper websites appear content to remain just that—visitors” (Larsson, 2012, p. 260).

In taking a closer look at the Swedish participatory journalism landscape, Karlsson et al. (2015a) find a similar trend. While more demanding forms of audience engagement, such as writing blogs or posting user comments, have never been activities that appealed to the broader Swedish readership, they did find that there was an increase of such behaviour on news sites from 2007 to 2010. However, they also found a rather dramatic decrease of this behaviour among readers from 2011 onwards. As opposed to Larsson (2012), Karlsson et al.

(2015a) attribute the absence of a profession-wide shift in power to users more so than journalistic professionals. Indeed, “this is not primarily a problem of reluctant producers but, more importantly, a lack of interest from users” (p. 295). However, a by the authors

recognised shortcoming of the participatory journalism study is the exclusion of social media networks. While tempering people’s expectations as to the potential for journalist-reader collaborations, Karlsson et al. (2015a) do note that these online networks “could well be seen as a potential participatory arena” (p. 305).

Previous research on two of such social media networks, Facebook and Twitter, has focused on both the media user, specifically the way they locate and engage with news, and the media organisation side, concerning their efforts to utilize online services to promote and distribute stories (e.g. Larsson, 2017; Meijer & Kormelink, 2015). As aforementioned, earlier research found that more demanding modes of audience engagement, such as journalist- reader collaborations, have proven rather unsuccessful (e.g. Larsson, 2012; Karlsson et al., 2015a). However, less demanding forms of user engagement, such as liking and sharing news content, have proven more successful and as such constitute more promising avenues for news organisations to explore (e.g. Larsson, 2011). Of the five by Larsson (2011) identified visitor types, three are characterised by some form of reader engagement.

The most journalist-reader collaborative of these is the ‘prosumer’, which is characterised by regular chats, comments and contributions on the site. This most active visitor type tends to be a man with high levels of societal engagement and internet skill.

While not visiting the site on a daily basis, he spends a relatively large amount of time on the site when he does and also visits multiple of the site’s sections. By contrast, the ‘lurker’ type, while scoring significant positive values across all variables measuring site visits, takes a more passive approach. This visitor enjoys the comments of other visitors, but limits their own participation mostly to reader questions and polls. Lastly, yet perhaps most relevantly, there’s the ‘filter’ type. This person is often a rather focused, female visitor and has a tendency to share content with friends via social networking sites or e-mail. Due to her reliance on news updates, she does not have to spend as much time visiting various of the site’s sections to get the information she’s after as the other types might have to.

Thus, the reality of media users’ willingness to engage in a largely less-demanding way provides quite a different view of the audience from the one proposed under the

“participatory journalism” or “citizen journalism” labels (Nip, 2006). Instead, a more

accurate description of the audience’s role appears to have been provided by Hermida et al.

(2011) who described them as “‘active recipients’ of news – somewhere between passive receivers and active creators of content” (p. 17). When an event takes place, users are expected to act through sending in their eyewitness reports along with photos and videos;

users are expected to share their interpretation of professionally filtered, processed and

distributed news by reacting to it. Indeed, as ‘active recipients’, “audiences are framed as idea generators and observers of newsworthy events at the start of the journalistic process, and then in an interpretive role as commentators who reflect upon the material that has been produced” (Hermida et al., 2010, p. 17). Thus, news professionals, while providing more opportunities for audience participation, by and large still view the audience as recipients of information controlled and created by the journalist (Hermida et al., 2010).

Accordingly, Hille and Bakker (2013) deemed audiences’ engagement a matter of

‘audience distribution’, of pre-packaged journalistic items, more so than ‘audience participation’. Of the Dutch news media landscape, the large majority were found to use Facebook for audience participation or content distribution. Yet, in reality, the way Dutch media utilise social media like Facebook is “very far removed from the ideals of grassroots participation and citizen journalism” (Hille and Bakker, 2013, p. 678). Instead of being used for true ‘participatory’ activities, most media use it as a distribution channel—and not even very effectively at that, it is argued. What is more, the by Hermida et al. (2010)

aforementioned contributions to or interpretations of reporting are found to be virtually non- existent, just like on-topic discussions with participating journalists. Instead, it appears that distribution and promotion of journalistic content trump conversation about and interaction with it. Still, audiences, as distributors of news, exert influence on journalistic processes and editorial decision making (e.g. Olmstead et al., 2011; Picone, 2016), which concerns the research questions. Then, the literature review will now turn to the social media platforms used by the audience for the distribution of news.

II.II The Platformised Society

In terms of digital infrastructure where the distribution takes place, social media are here understood as platforms allowing users to connect to each other as well as to produce, create and distribute content in such digital networks (boyd & Ellison, 2007). Thus, social media are part of today’s platform society. Characteristic of this society, as described by Van Dijck et al. (2018), is the channelling of economic, social, and interpersonal traffic by a global online platform ecosystem that is organised through algorithms and fuelled by data. In this context, an online ‘platform’ constitutes “a programmable digital architecture designed to organize interactions between users” (p. 4), which is geared towards the collection,

processing, circulation and monetisation of user data. While many people conceive of such platforms as technological tools, allowing us to chat, comment, share, date, search, and buy stuff online, the activities they promote hide a logic and logistics that go far beyond the realm of simple facilitation: they actually shape the organisation of society and the way we live (Gehl, 2011).

Platforms inherently accumulate substantial amounts of data—both user data and

content data (Mayer-Schönberger & Cukier, 2013; Van Dijck, 2014), among which are also

user engagement metrics which helped to identify the sample that was relied upon to answer

the research questions. The collection of this data is enabled and given shape by hardware

and software; people access platforms using devices: technological tools that frequently come

equipped with apps and software able to automatically collect data. With every cursor movement and mouse click, user data is generated, stored, analysed and processed. In addition to including basic intelligence concerning geolocations and internet protocol

addresses, this data contains detailed information about the interests, tastes and preferences of individual users. Such data fuels a growing inter-platform connectivity. Platforms, by means of what is known as application programming interfaces (APIs), then, offer their platform data to third parties, giving them detailed metric and user behaviour insights. This

information, in turn, can be used to build new platforms or applications.

Another key player in the connective architecture of today’s platform society are algorithms, which in Reddit’s case help determine the ranking, and thus the exposure, of news stories and the organisations behind them—thereby concerning the research questions.

These sets of automated instructions aim to achieve a desired outcome by transforming the input data (Pasquale, 2015; Gillespie, 2014). For instance, on the basis of online activities of

“friends” and “friends of friends”, Facebook’s News Feed algorithms determine which content you will be exposed to. And, in rating the relevance of a webpage, Google’s PageRank algorithms calculate the quantity and quality of hyperlinks to this page (Bucher, 2012). Algorithms enable platforms to automatically filter vast amounts of content and, in doing so, connect users to advertisements, services and content. While every now and then a veil may be lifted, algorithms, by and large, are anything but transparent and remain well- guarded trade secrets. Moreover, they are subject to constant tweaking and are increasingly complex.

Trading the technological for an economic focus, two other architectural components of a platform are its ownership status and business model (Van Dijck et al., 2018). The former refers to its specific legal-economic status; most importantly, whether it operates on a for-profit or non-profit basis. Ownership status not only affects a site’s economic transactions but also its social interactions with users. Therefore, recognizing the potentially changing owner-consumer relationships is relevant for the users of a platform. For instance, when Couchsurfing Inc. changed from a non-profit traveller’s network financed by donations to a for-profit corporation in 2011, many members objected to this shift (Roudman, 2013).

Couchsurfing’s shift in ownership status brought with it a change of business model.

A platform’s business model refers to the way in which it creates and captures economic value (Van Dijck et al., 2018). While more traditional measures of currency such as money and attention are still in place, data and user valuation (more users equals a higher value) have become equally popular ways of monetisation in the online world. A related myth concerning such monetisation is that a platform’s services are ‘free’ for many offer them without charge. Facebook and Twitter, two platforms engaged later on, are just two examples of many social networks that monetise through the earlier mentioned automated connecting of users with data, content and advertisements (Couldry, 2015).

As a result of this ‘free’ strategy adopted by many platforms, the default business

model in today’s platformised ecosystem is one where convenient services are traded for

personal information (Schneier, 2015). Through the automatic collection and processing of

user data, platforms are able to profile and target individual users as well as specific user

groups. While profiling has long been part and parcel of the mass media’s attempts to

monetise viewers’ or readers’ information, today’s data analytics offer precision instruments

that are far more speedy and exact than traditional profiling methods (Nieborg, 2017). Using

this potential to personalise advertising in real time, Facebook can identify and target a

subgroup of the population; for instance, men between the ages of 18-23 that live in a particular region who are in search of a new car.

Single platforms can choose from a wide variety of different business models. They can create economic value out of content, data, user contacts, advertisements, subscriptions or through charging fees; additionally, they could sell profiling information to governments or other companies in need of such data (Van Dijck et al, 2018). Along with Couchsurfing’s earlier mentioned shift from a non-profit network to a for-profit corporation, the company changed its business model. Whereas before it charged travellers a membership fee, the corporation’s new profit-orientation entailed a shift to a business model focused on advertising and data-sharing. Needless to say, this too was met with a fair amount of objections from many of its members (Van Dijck et al, 2018).

In addition to steering user interaction, a platform’s economic and technological elements also influence social norms (Van Dijck et al., 2018). Despite being offered a finite set of usage possibilities, platform users are not at the mere mercy of the in the platform- embedded techno-commercial tools. A platform, through its protocols, algorithms and

interfaces, can encourage some user interactions while discouraging others (Helmond, 2015).

For example, a ‘like button’ is more effective when inserted on the right-hand, as opposed to the left-hand, corner. Consequently, there are researchers who view major platforms as laboratories for new features to be tested on users (Benuban-Fich, 2016). When Facebook received public criticism for soliciting about sexual orientation and gender in a solely binary way, the company changed its approach to allow users to defy any categorisation—a decision that made economic sense, as it resulted in more refined user data, and simultaneously

influenced social norms.

The last important platform-governing aspect are user agreements, what are often called ‘terms of service’ (Van Dijck et al., 2018). Due to their long and convoluted nature, not to mention the fact that they are subject to change, people often check the box without so much as glancing over these ‘agreements’. Besides defining service conditions, the terms of service can also impose a number of privacy-related norms or values. Airbnb, for example, implemented an antidiscrimination policy in November 2016. The new rule prohibited hosts from declining or imposing different terms or conditions on guests on the basis of their ethnicity, race, colour, national origin, sexual orientation, religion, marital status or gender identity. Indeed, terms of service agreements are an important way for platforms to ‘govern’

their relationship with users or third parties. Such managerial adaptations to public sentiment do, however, raise the question of public legitimacy (Van Dijck et al., 2018).

Combined, these sociological, technological and economic elements inform today’s continuously changing and developing platform society (Van Dijck et al., 2018). Although a dissection of a single platform helps in understanding how users and user practices are informed by a platform’s combined elements, these individuals platforms can only function as part of a bigger ecosystem. Then, while a thorough investigation into the workings of the platform ecosystem at large is beyond the scope of this research, Van Dijck et al. (2018) aptly summarised the paradoxical nature of this system. Indeed,

It looks egalitarian yet is hierarchical; it is almost entirely corporate, but it appears to serve

public value; it seems neutral and agnostic, but its architecture carries a particular set of

ideological values; its effects appear local, while its scope and impact are global; it

appears to replace “top-down” “big government” with “bottom-up” “customer

empowerment”, yet it is doing so by means of a highly centralized structure which remains opaque to its users. (Van Dijck et al., 2018, p. 6-7)

Clearly, while empowering the audience in its sharing capabilities, and thereby forming the backbone of this research, platforms can take—often in the form of data and in an obscure manner—as much as they give. Having covered the audience as news distributors as well as the platforms used for the sharing of news, the literature review finally combines the two and turns to news sharing on social media.

II.III News Sharing on Social Media

Naturally, active recipients who potentially engage in the sharing of news content on such (social media) platforms can be beneficial to media organisations. Specifically, the sharing of news on social media significantly enhances the reach of media organisations (An et al., 2011), which helps news items attain the coveted status of going ‘viral’ (e.g. Phillips, 2012). Krumsvik (2013) suggested that encouraging news sharing is one of news

organisations’ main strategies for user involvement. His chapter provides an overview of four different types of online user involvement: Deliberation, Donation, Distribution and Data.

Central to this research is the Distribution strategy, characterised by utilizing personal

recommendations and exploiting existing social networks. Deliberation is rooted in notions of public debate and discussion, often expressed in comment sections accompanying news items. The Donation strategy is closely related to the earlier mentioned forms of

participatory- or citizen journalism, relying on contributions to the news content by the public. Lastly, the Data strategy revolves around the aforementioned collection of personal user data for the purpose of targeted advertising.

Kümpel et al. (2015) found that earlier research focusing on the sharing of news content typically centres around one of four research areas: users, organisations, content or networks. For instance, in an effort to find what characterises the, via email, most shared New York Times news items, content research by Berger and Milkman (2012) focused on how emotion affects virality. It was found that positive content tends to be more viral than negative content, but that the relationship between social transmission and emotion is dependent on more than just valence alone. Virality was found to be partly driven by physiological arousal. Those pieces of online content that did well in stimulating arousal, whether they happened to be positive or negative emotions, were in turn more viral. The opposite was also found to be true: low arousal-evoking pieces tended to be less viral. On the basis of this finding, one can, as did Kalsnes & Larsson (2018), speculate that soft, rather than hard, news is more successful in being shared in online social spaces. As opposed to hard news, which is often characterised by consequential, timely and important news such as business and politics, soft news topics include celebrity, entertainment and lifestyle news (Reuters Institute, 2016).

The extent to which a particular news item is spread is further influenced by the social

media platform used for sharing as well as the prominence of the news organisation (in this

case, the sender) (Ingram, 2015). Though news sharing is viewed as important from the

perspective of the respective senders, some previous studies have found that audiences tend

to be reluctant in accepting even the active recipient role, the more or less negotiated position

between passive recipients and active creators of content, as discussed earlier. For example,

Nielsen & Schrøder (2014) found that among their sample of online news users, “a majority

seems to prefer relatively passive forms of news consumption” (p. 484). Their conclusion is in line with earlier findings from Newman & Levy (2013), who found significant differences across countries in users’ sharing or participating behaviour on social networking sites—with at most one third of the respondents from a specific country doing so. What makes the

discrepancy between the number of people who use Facebook and other social media platforms for social purposes and the number of people who use such sites for public

purposes such as finding, accessing and engaging with news all the more striking, Nielsen &

Schrøder (2014) argue, is the mainstream status of social media. Indeed, in most researched countries they have been part of users’ wider cross-media repertoires for years—yet, still only a handful of people use social media for public purposes.

Meijer & Kormelink’s (2015) research participants confirm users’ propensity for passive news consumption, the main reason for their inactivity being that they are careful to present themselves too much on the social platforms. In the words of one research participant, when she does like a news article, she is “pretty aware of what is in the article and what other people might think of me because of that” (p. 674). The researchers further note that the interviewees only engage in social user practices—such as sharing, liking, commenting and voting—if it ‘yields’ something for them. In other words, users need to be incentivized to participate in journalism. When they do rarely share a news piece on Facebook, it serves a communicative function and plays a role in the curation of their online personas. Their findings relate to Picone’s (2011) study, who concluded that what keeps users from participating is the idea of what others will think of their contribution. Indeed, self- confidence and self-expression are user elements interpreted in light of a contribution’s potential public. Consequently, he argues that “it is not so much the difficulty of writing a comment that holds users back from voting, sharing or reacting to a news story, but other users’ response to it” (p. 115). This led Kalsnes & Larsson (2018) to theorise that “users might feel the need to curate their social media profiles, and certain news items might not fit easily with the public, online view that we as social media users wish to uphold” (p. 1673).

However, in their analysis of what news topics do make it through on Facebook &

Twitter at the hands of audience distributors, Kalsnes & Larsson (2018) found that Facebook, in a Norwegian context, was characterised by predominantly soft news topics focusing on parenting, education, issues regarding children and health. Meanwhile, Twitter, in the same context, showed a preference for hard news topics. In a descending order of frequency, these topics dealt with social, sports, crime, cultural and finally political news topics. Needless to say, any such research is always influenced by the respective cultural context in which the study is carried out. Indeed, in their study of the American Twitter landscape, Brena et al.

(2019), by contrast, discovered an emphasis on the political news topic.

Lastly, though the majority of social media news sharing research focuses on Twitter (e.g. Skogerbø & Krumsvik, 2015; Hedman, 2015) and has recently expanded to include Facebook (e.g. Kalsnes & Larsson, 2018), the study of other social media platforms provides a welcome and much needed change of pace. Indeed, beyond its sheer monthly visits

(Clement, 2020), Reddit is a platform worth studying for its fundamentally different characteristics. For example, due to the anonymity of its users, who are hiding behind a unique, individually-chosen username, the most shared news items on Reddit might well differ from findings of previous research focused on social media platforms where profile curation is a concern. Additionally, users might be more incentivized to participate in

journalism on Reddit. Indeed, Meijer & Kormelink (2015) maintain that Reddit is an example

of a website where voting, or liking, does generate a certain effect. Reddit users, through this interactive feature, thus wield the collective power to judge the value and thereby the ranking of a specific user submission. In line with the earlier discussed research questions, then, the aim of the thesis at hand is to discern which types of content characterise the most shared news items on Reddit, which organisations are behind said items, what differences can be discerned between the most actively and passive engaged news stories on Reddit and, through a discussion of the findings, discover what differences there are compared to earlier

researched social media platforms.

III Method

Content analysis was deemed the most appropriate method of analysis for it is used to unobtrusively examine communication patterns in a systematic and replicable manner

(Bryman & Bell, 2011). The analysis is conducted using collected texts, which can be either written, oral or visual, and which can be analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively (Luo, 2019). Either approach revolves around the categorisation and subsequent analysis of themes, concepts and words within the texts (Luo, 2019). That being said, the method section will now turn to the specifics of the empirical research.

III.I Data Collection

The data was gathered from Reddit, which is a “massive collection of forums where people can share news and content or comment on other people’s posts” (Widman, 2020, first para.). Reddit differs from other social media sites in a number of ways. Most importantly, Reddit, instead of being based around people’s social networks, consists of moderated

communities called subreddits—of which there are over two million, devoted to almost every topic imaginable (Metrics for Reddit, 2020). Then, whereas Facebook puts your social

networks and your contact with them first, connections on Reddit are primarily centred around user-submitted posts (Fernandis, 2019). As a result of the aforementioned, Reddit, in contrast to most social media sites, has an inherent anonymous nature due to users hiding behind an individually-chosen username instead of their real name, which would allow for easy connecting with friends and family.

Reddit, as a social news site having the potential to fulfil legacy media’s traditional task of setting the agenda and informing democratic deliberation (Suran and Kilgo, 2017;

Leavitt & Clark, 2014), is believed to be an influential site of information distribution and discussion (Leavitt & Clark, 2014). Though less prominent than social media giants like Twitter and Facebook, social news sites are frequently used by millions of people. According to Alexa ranking data, Reddit is the sixth most visited website in the United States, and the twentieth most visited in the world (Alexa, n.d.). Redditors tend to be politically interested, heavy consumers of news (McCullough, 2010). Their platform is also more democratic and discursive when compared to most other social media platforms (Straub-Cook, 2018).

Reddit’s main purpose is to facilitate a discussion of the posted content, which is not limited by character length. Rather than being restricted to specific social networks, anyone can view and participate in conversations on Reddit.

Despite this, there is a risk in trying to generalise too much from observations of

Redditors’ behaviour. A study of American Reddit users found that they are predominantly

young (64% are under 29), white (70%), and male (67%) (Barthel et al., 2016). As 42% of

them hold a college degree, as opposed to 28% of the general population, they also tend to be

higher educated. Possibly related to the young userbase, they include slightly more low

earners and slightly fewer high earners than the general population. Finally, in addition to

being heavy internet users, they are also more liberal when compared to all United States

adults. While Reddit boards may be on any imaginable topic, user characteristics, like the

aforementioned, could influence what topics are of interest, which resources are found and

referenced, and what is considered sound evidence in support of a claim. For instance,

Redditors who report using the site to get their news, while slightly older than the typical

Redditor, indeed tend to be white, male and liberal. Yet, because of the high amount of

Reddit traffic data, this study offers a meaningful insight into the news sharing practices of a significant group of news consumers.

As a result of Reddit’s inherently anonymous nature, with Redditors hiding behind a username, the data was gathered in a non-intrusive manner not unlike the practice of ‘lurking’

as described by Williams (2008) in the context of digital non-participant observation.

Consequently, this negates the “supposedly sensitive issues related to online sharing

practices” (Kalsnes & Larsson, 2018, p. 1673). As indicated by Meijer & Kormelink (2015), research into audience engagement and news consumptions practices tends to heavily rely on survey or diary-based inquiries, methods where respondents or participants self-report their behaviour. While capable of providing interesting insights, these approaches are limited by people’s overestimation of their news use (e.g. Prior, 2009; Nielsen & Schrøder, 2014).

In contrast to earlier research (Kalsnes & Larsson, 2018), data collection takes place from Reddit’s own website instead of using the assistance of Storyboard—a social media analytics tool. As such, sharing outside the familiar sharing infrastructure of news

organisations’ websites is considered (i.e. sharing a URL on Reddit instead of using the embedded share or retweet buttons found on news media’s sites). Thus, the study at hand takes a platform-oriented, as opposed to a news-organisation-oriented, approach—it relies on the platform used for sharing (here, Reddit), instead of the sender’s respective website (here, the news organisation), to determine the to-be-analysed sample of most shared news stories.

As touched upon in the introduction, Reddit is based around moderated communities, called subreddits, as opposed to people, which more traditional social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are centred around. Specifically, this thesis’ analytical efforts will be focused on the largest news subreddit: /r/worldnews. As the name implies, this community is dedicated to covering major news from around the world—unlike its little brother /r/news, which is largely devoted to United States internal news. For moderation determines content, the rules specific to /r/worldnews are as follows: 1) no US internal news or politics; 2) no editorialised or misleading titles; 3) no feature stories; 4) no editorials, opinion or analysis pieces; 5) no articles in languages other than English; 6) no images, videos or audio clips; 7) no bigotry or other offensive content; 8) no personal attacks on other users; 9) no memes, gifs, unlabelled NSFW (not safe for work) images; and 10) no old news articles (≥ 1 week old).

Given this research’s focus on news sharing on social media, it was crucial to identify, and subsequently analyse, the comparatively most shared—and potentially viral—news items. On Reddit, sharing takes place by means of a form of passive engagement: upvotes.

The more upvotes a post (or submission) from a particular Redditor receives, the higher the chance it will be seen by other users on the platform. Stories are initially posted in a specific subreddit and can, in the case of a sufficient amount of upvotes, find their way to the front page of Reddit—as was the case with most, if not all, of the for this study sampled news stories. The selection of said sample was fairly straightforward. After having navigated to the /r/worldnews subreddit, posts were first filtered by top (sorting them by amount of upvotes from highest to lowest) and subsequently by all time (including all posts to the subreddit).

The result is a virtually endless list of news articles, the top 100 of which are selected as the

sample for the study at hand. The most shared news item received ~200,000 upvotes, with the

least shared coming in at ~102,000 upvotes. All articles were from the last five years, during

which no significant changes in Reddit’s workings occurred.

This same sample of most shared news stories on Reddit is, due to the technical inability to sort by comments on Reddit, what the analysis of the most actively engaged articles, pertaining to the final research question, is based on. As such, it is only possible to find out which stories within the top 100 most shared, or upvoted, do best in stimulating active engagement by means of comments. Concretely, this means that most shared story number 101, despite potentially having received more active engagement that any of the top 100 most shared stories, will not be considered. This is important to note since, as the analysis points out, many of the articles with a lot of active engagement are not necessarily the ones that received a significant amount of passive engagement. Indeed, apart from the three entries that also made it into the top ten most shared, all most actively engaged articles rank between 48-95 in terms of sharing—out of a sampled 100 news stories. That being said, it is equally key to realise that those articles not in the top 100 have received considerably less exposure, and are consequently not as likely to have received a lot of active engagement.

In any case, an analysis of the most actively engaged news stories among those most shared yields valuable insights because of the wide audience these stories have been exposed to.

III.II Data Analysis

In a similar fashion to previous research by Kalsnes & Larsson (2018), the sampled news articles were assessed according to their topic, which describes their main themes. For the purpose of doing so, a codebook has been established based on the nine categories as provided by Sjøvaag et al. (2016), which were also relied on by Kalsnes & Larsson (2018).

These are

Politics (including war and terrorism, demonstrations and public administration);

Economy (including personal economy, business, finance and markets); Crime (including murders, violence, trafficking, police issues and trials); Social issues (including work, health and education, environmental issues, consumer, construction and traffic issues);

Culture (including arts, media, royalty, curiosities, leisure and popular culture); Sports;

Accidents; Weather; and Science and technology issues. (Sjøvaag et al., 2016, p. 956)

Due to the larger sample size than earlier research by Kalsnes & Larsson (2018), a quantitative, as opposed to qualitative, content analysis was deemed most suitable. While quantitative means were used to identify and analyse the sample as a whole, similar to Kalsnes & Larsson’s (2018) study, more qualitative approaches were employed to describe the contents of the ten most shared and actively engaged stories—a 10% subsample, which is of equal size to previous research by Kalsnes & Larsson (2018). Unlike Kalsnes & Larsson’s (2018) study, however, the sampled articles were not assessed according to their genre (tone of voice)—given the rules of the subreddit, which prohibit features or opinions, this would be a pointless endeavour. In addition to the news item topic, a range of metadata and interlinked content (e.g. username of the sharer, the news organisation behind the shared news item and the amount of upvotes and comments) were recorded so as to have allowed for patterns to inductively emerge from the data.

A quantitative approach, for the sample as a whole, was deemed most suitable as it

assigns categories according to fixed rules (Riffe et al., 2019) for this otherwise rather

subjective, interpretive task. The coding was based only on the headline, a possible sub-

headline, and the first paragraph, which helped to decide on one main topic for those news

items that included several. A preliminary coding session using the established codebook was performed to ensure its functionality for the dataset at hand. To ensure the reliability of the news item topic coding and to make the results as reproduceable as possible, an interrater reliability test was successfully performed. When performing such tests, as rightfully

discussed by numerous literary works (e.g. Lavrakas, 2008), there is always the potential for the coders to agree by chance. However, with nine different coding categories, the current coding had a relatively low hypothetical probability of chance agreement. What is more, out of a randomly selected 10% subsample, there was perfect agreement between both coders.

Consequently, the coding was, in addition to being valid, considered to be reliable.

An obvious limitation of the content analysis, which was also identified by Luo

(2019), was its time-consuming nature. While the focus on the (sub-)headline and the first

paragraph—pertaining to the coding of the news items—helped mitigate this, it also put the

research at risk of reductivism: by focusing on isolated words and phrases, the context and

nuance of some news stories may have been disregarded (Luo, 2019).

IV Results

IV.I Most Shared News Stories

For the rest of the paper, the term share will be used to indicate distribution on Reddit. As explained in the previous chapter, sharing on Reddit takes place by means of upvotes. For Redditors, this provides a way to judge the value and thereby the ranking of user submissions (Meijer & Kormelink, 2015). Initially, the paper turns to the types of content that characterise the most frequently shared news stories on Reddit.

The results listed in Table 1 (pages 20-22) are the top ten most shared news stories on Reddit. Account refers to the Reddit account used to create the submission—the usernames of which have been anonymised in favour of a Redditor ID. In the case of a specific user

appearing in both top ten lists, concerning either the most shared or the most actively engaged news stories, the same ID was used to reflect this. The distribution date refers to the date when the Reddit post was created, and the article was thus distributed (date adjusted to GMT +1 or +2 time zone, depending on whether the post was created during Central European Standard or Summer Time). The Reddit Post ID refers to the easy-tracking ID assigned to every Reddit submission, and thus every accompanying news item. The posts are numbered in an ascending order starting with the most widely shared submission. Upvotes refers to the number of upvotes a submission has received. As such, this is what determines how widely shared the submissions are and, by extension, the ranking presented in Table 1. Comments refers to the number of comments a submission has received. As opposed to the

aforementioned upvotes, comments constitute a form of active engagement with the news story. Title refers to the title of the Reddit submission as created by the respective user listed under account. As becomes clear at a glance, the title of the Reddit post can, and often does, differ from the headline, which is the headline of the original article as published by its respective outlet. The publication date refers to the date when the news item was published by the above outlet—which is referred to as the news organisation. Lastly, the news topic refers to the news articles’ main themes as specified in the previous chapter.

The two most shared articles, as listed in Table 1, are from The New York Times and concern American president Donald Trump. As such, they seemingly defy the first rule of the /r/worldnews subreddit, which states that US internal news or politics are prohibited.

However, the rule specifies that only those news stories that have no involvement of foreign officials or international organisations and that have no effect on people outside the US are banned. Then, the most shared article of the sample as a whole, with 202.000 upvotes,

concerns Trump’s impeachment for his abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. Already, this first article stands out in a number of ways. First, counting fewer than 200 words, the article is extremely short. Additionally, it’s not so much the text as the graphics that play an important role in this piece from The New York Times. These graphics depict how every representative in Congress voted for the two articles of impeachment on the table. Second, while the title of the Reddit post—"Trump Impeached for Abuse of Power”—aptly conveys the news, the original headline of the news organisation —"Impeachment Results: How Democrats and Republicans Voted”—absolutely does not. That being said, the news did find its way into the lead of The New York Times’ article, which likely started as a liveblog tracking the voting in real-time. Instead of potentially having to wait for the outlet’s

definitive article, which was eventually published under the headline ‘Trump Impeached for

Abuse of Power and Obstruction of Congress’, Redditor 1 decided to link to the original

voting results and change the headline of the Reddit submission to one that is worthy of reading and sharing.

The second most shared news story on Reddit, with 189.000 upvotes, covers Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election and Trump’s attempts to cover this up. The story goes that just two weeks before his inauguration, Trump was shown highly classified information indicating Russian president Vladimir Putin’s interference in the 2016

presidential election. More specifically, Putin allegedly ordered cyberattacks to sway the election results. The majority of the article, however, is dedicated to Trump’s efforts to muddy this message. Compared to the most shared article, this runner-up from The New York Times is a more traditional style article, coming in at over 1.000 words accompanied by a proper headline that conveys the news: “From the Start, Trump Has Muddied A Clear

Message: Putin Interfered”. But that didn’t stop Redditor 2 from replacing it anyway. Instead, he opted for a more informative, longer title for his Reddit post: “Two weeks before his inauguration, Donald J. Trump was shown highly classified intelligence indicating that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had personally ordered complex cyberattacks to sway the 2016 American election”. To come to this title, Redditor 2 copied the entire first

paragraph of the news organisation’s article. Both news stories from The New York Times did extremely well in promoting passive (sharing) as well as active (commenting) engagement, which is why The New York Times as a news organisation scored relatively high average values among their contributions, as is presented in Table 3 (pages 25-26).

The third most shared news story also concerns the United States as it discusses Mexico’s border shutdown in response to the United States coronavirus case count surpassing 2.000. In particular, Trump takes centre stage for the third time in a row because of his

peculiar remarks regarding the situation. Specifically, one tweet from the president engaged in the article reads: “to this point, and because we have had a very strong border policy, we have had 40 deaths related to Coronavirus. If we had weak or open borders, that number would be many times higher!”. However, as The Daily Mail reports, this boasting over strong borders stands in stark contrast to the reality of the situation. This reality entails that the conversation over closing the US-Mexico border is, for once, being driven by Mexico—a country with then only 16 confirmed coronavirus cases and no reported deaths as opposed to the United States’ 2000 cases and 43 deaths. In the words of Mexican health minister Hugo Lopez-Gatell: ‘Mexico wouldn’t bring the virus to the United States, rather the United States would bring it here’. Unfortunately, the article falls shy of taking into account differences in testing capability as well as population size. However, omitting these factual data might have aided the article in going viral by emphasising the peculiarity of the situation. For the first time, the Redditor behind the submission—Redditor 3—decided to opt for the headline of the news organisation as the title of the respective Reddit post. As such, both read: “Mexico is considering closing its border to stop Americans bringing coronavirus into its country as US case count passes 2,000”. While this Reddit post still scores relatively high in terms of passive engagement, with 167.000 upvotes, the active engagement drops to about half of that of the first two news stories by The New York Times. With this change comes a shift in news topic from politics to social.

The fourth most shared news story to make it into the list, with 154.000 upvotes, is

the first to not revolve around US-president Donald Trump. Instead, the article concerns one

of the biggest stories from 2016: the Panama Papers. With that comes a news topic shift from

social, and before that politics, to economy—making it the first and only article qualifying as

this news topic to make it into the top ten most shared news stories on Reddit. This English story from German news organisation Süddeutsche Zeitung is based on a 2.6 terabyte data leak of encrypted internal documents from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. The leak came from an anonymous individual and provided rare insights of a financial world that exists only in the shadows. Instead of opting for the short generic title of the news

organisation—“Panama Papers: The secrets of dirty money”—Redditor 4 thought of a more informative title for his Reddit submission: “2.6 terabyte leak of Panamanian shell company data reveals ‘how a global industry led by major banks, legal firms, and asset management companies secretly manages the estates of politicians, Fifa officials, fraudsters and drug smugglers, celebrities and professional athletes’”. While bumping up the active engagement beyond the levels seen by The Daily Mail’s story, it does fall short of the aforementioned two controversial stories about Trump.

The fifth most shared news story, with 150.000 upvotes, does make a return to United States president Donald Trump. This story from The Hill is about Churchill’s grandson, Nicholas Soames, critiquing Trump for skipping a visit to an American cemetery and war memorial in northern France, which the White House said in a statement. Soames tweeted that “they [American soldiers] died with their face to the foe and that pathetic inadequate

@realDonaldTrump couldn’t even defy the weather to pay his respects to The Fallen”.

Additionally, Soames included a hashtag saying that “he [Donald Trump] is not fit to represent his great country”. Former aide of president Barack Obama Ben Rhodes, who helped plan all of Obama’s trips during his presidency, also jumped on the bandwagon tweeting that “there was always a rain option. Always.” As is the case with some of the other Reddit titles covered so far, Redditor 5 decided to modify the original headline from the news organisation. While copying the original “Churchill's grandson slams Trump for skipping cemetery visit because of weather”, he added Soames’ tweet. Thus, the title became:

“Churchill's grandson slams Trump for skipping cemetery visit because of weather: ‘They died with their face to the foe and that pathetic inadequate @realDonaldTrump couldn’t even defy the weather to pay his respects to The Fallen,’ Soames tweeted”. With this fifth spot in the top ten, the active engagement dwindles to a mediocre 8.000 comments.

The sixth most shared story, with 149.000 upvotes, is the fourth story to qualify as politics so far, which is evident of the dominant position of this news topic over the others.

This story by The Independent, the second most featured news organisation along with The Guardian in the top 100 most shared news stories on Reddit (Table 3), covers the growing resentment in the United Kingdom against police brutality versus ethnic minorities in the United States. More specifically, it focuses on how the Scottish Parliament has called for an immediate suspension of rubber bullet, riot gear and tear gas exports to the United States in light of the above development. The article claims that the United States is one of the largest buyers of UK arms, with the export of such totalling around £6 billion since 2010. Moreover, the UK government’s licensing criteria states that exports should be denied when there is a

“clear risk that items might be used for internal repression”. Interestingly, Redditor 6 deemed

the original news organisation’s headline sufficient and thus adopted “Scottish Parliament

votes for immediate suspension of tear gas, rubber bullet and riot shield exports to US” as the

title for his Reddit submission. As such, they expect a certain news awareness of potential

readers and deems more context in the title unnecessary. By contrast, it is not unthinkable

that some of the previous Redditors would have chosen to modify the title, for instance by

providing context in the form of ‘…exports to US in light of recent police brutality’ or by

quoting Patrick Harvie, the parliament member who proposed the amendment, describing the US as a “racist state”.

The seventh most shared news story on Reddit, with 148.000 upvotes, comes from The Guardian—which also ranks second in the most shared news organisation list (Table 3).

This time, a political figure other than US president Donald Trump takes centre stage—

namely Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro. As such, like the Panama Papers story, this news piece provides a welcome change of pace by not directly relating to the United States. After repeatedly trivialising the coronavirus and flouting safety measures against it, Bolsonaro announced on live television that he had tested positive for the virus. Despite testing positive, Bolsonaro went on to attend political rallies and social events often without wearing any masks or wearing them incorrectly. Moreover, The Guardian reported that Brazil lacks a permanent health minister after two were forced to step down after clashes with Bolsonaro over the pandemic. Like the previous most shared news story, Redditor 7 used the news organisation’s headline—“Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro test positive for coronavirus”—

for the title of his Reddit submission. With 7.400 comments, this seventh entry on the list causes a small, final spike in the amount of active engagement. By comparison, the most shared article, from The New York Times, received a total of 20.600 comments.

In a similar non-US fashion, the eighth most shared story, by the BBC, covers

Sydney’s controversial New Year’s Eve fireworks show. As a news organisation, the BBC is a close pursuer of The Guardian and The Independent in terms of contributions to the top 100 list (Table 3). Its article, with 146.000 upvotes, focuses on the petition signed by over a quarter of a million people to cancel Sydney’s traditional New Year’s Eve fireworks show and instead spend the money on fighting ravaging, state-wide bushfires. These fires were the result of record-breaking temperatures and a severe drought in late 2019. According to the protesters, all the additional smoke in the air may traumatise people who are dealing with enough smoke as is. Even though huge swathes of land and large parts of towns had been completely destroyed, the Lord Mayor of Sydney, Clover Moore, stated that they “cant cancel the fireworks and even if we could, doing so would have little practical benefit”. The reason being that plans for the show had been made 15 months in advance and that large parts of the budget had already been spent. Unlike the previous two stories, Redditor 8 changed the original BBC headline—“Sydney fireworks: Thousands sign petition to halt ‘traumatic’

show”—to include more context. As such, the title of the Reddit submission became: “More than a quarter of a million people have signed a petition calling for Sydney's New Year's Eve fireworks to be cancelled and the money spent on fighting fires that threaten the city.” In a similar fashion to the second most shared story on this list, Redditor 8 thus relies on the entire first paragraph of the news story for his title. With this eighth entry in the top 100 list, comes the second lowest active engagement with just 3.100 comments.

The nineth most shared story, by progressive US-based news website Common Dreams, covers a topic that ought to be close to heart for most Redditors: the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) attack on net neutrality. In essence, it concerns a battle between consumers and big businesses. Critics claim that the FCC’s plan, which stops internet service providers (ISPs) from having to treat all internet communications equally, is nothing but naked corporatism. Indeed, as one senior policy analyst declared: “Gutting net neutrality will have a devastating effect on free speech online. Without it, gateway

corporations like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T will have too much power to mess with the

free flow of information.” Concretely, this would allow such corporations to for instance