A Political Cartography of News Sharing on Twitter

Online sharing strongly guides which news people encounter on a daily basis. In this context, especially research on the types of news shared by users of differential political leaning has received considerable attention. We argue that many existing approaches (i) rely on an overly simplified measurement of political leaning, (ii) consider only the outlet level in their analyses, and/or (iii) study news circulation among partisans by making ex-ante distinctions between partisan and non-partisan news. We introduce a research pipeline that allows a systematic mapping of news sharing both with respect to source and content in a multidimensional political space. Based on the resulting political cartography of news sharing for the German Twittersphere, we show that political fringes are most actively circulating news, especially right-wing elite-/EU-skeptical/protectionist users. Outlets mostly shared by right-leaning users turn out to supply news to both highly elite-/EU-skeptical/protectionist users and their ideological counterparts – but not the same stories. We do not find evidence for strong news fragmentation. However, news sharing is disproportionately reliant on few intermediaries towards the right and elite-/EU-skeptical/protectionist dimension. Implications for future research are discussed.