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An Ecosystem Divided? Cross-Platform Election Information Flows

Sun, September 8, 8:00 to 9:30am, Marriott Philadelphia Downtown, 502

Abstract

Social media enables an interconnected online ecosystem in which content circulation transcends any single platform's boundaries. The growing area of cross-platform research has embraced this reality and examined how actors engage across online communities. For example, news outlets, politicians, and Russian IRA sockpuppet accounts all have engaged in coordinated cross-platform posting. Nevertheless, even average users can propel content sharing between platforms. Today’s TikTok trend may appear in tomorrow’s Instagram reel, and false claims originating on 4chan may easily spread to Reddit and Twitter.

However, the contemporary social media landscape has seen a notable bifurcation between established social media giants like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube and newer alt-tech platforms that directly oppose these mainstream platforms. These niche forums, such as Telegram, 4chan, and Truth Social, contend with perceived speech restrictions on mainstream sites, advocating for unfiltered and unrestricted discourse. This stark contrast to their mainstream counterparts' more controlled content moderation policies underscores that while all social media platforms are different, some are more aligned than others. We expect social media platforms, both mainstream and niche, to be interconnected via cross-platform content sharing and argue that interconnection tells us something important about how information, ideas, and beliefs circulate through the contemporary online ecosystem.

Our empirical analysis is situated in the 2022 U.S. Midterm Elections. Using a robust set of election-related keywords, we collected social media posts from Facebook, Reddit, Telegram, and 4chan between October 1 and December 9, 2022. Because we are particularly interested in how information flows across platforms, we then identified all posts which include at least one URL link to a social media platform. For this study, we focus particularly on posts which contain links to the mainstream social media sites of Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Reddit, or links to the alt-tech sites Gab, Gettr, Truth Social, Bitchute, Rumble, 4chan, and Telegram. In total, our dataset includes nearly 75,000 posts which themselves link to additional social media content.

Our results provide strong evidence that platforms are often interconnected through URLs in the social media ecology. All the social media platforms we studied (Facebook, Reddit, Telegram, and 4chan) had at least a handful of links to other platforms—and some had thousands. Notably, YouTube was a frequently linked-to platform, which is consistent with existing evidence from Twitter data. A plurality of Facebook, Reddit, and 4chan URLs linked to YouTube, underscoring YouTube’s importance in the social media ecology. Additionally, Telegram and Facebook had many self-links, possibly due to the affordances of those platforms. As our Telegram and Facebook data are derived from groups (specifically, Telegram public channels and chats and Facebook public groups and pages), URLs are necessary to transfer content from one group to another within the platform. Over 90% of the social media links for these two platforms were self-links to other Facebook groups/pages or Telegram channels/chats. This number differed significantly from 4chan, which seldom self-linked. This fact suggests that a typology of social media platforms should consider URL sharing, both in terms of the platforms’ affordances and user behavior. Overall, our findings highlight the need for more cross-platform studies of information flows across both the mainstream and alt-tech information ecosystem.

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