Social media gatekeeping: An analysis of the gatekeeping influence of newspapers’ public Facebook pages

Due to the rising importance of social media platforms for news diffusion, newspapers are relying on social media editors to promote the distribution of their news items on these platforms. In this study, we investigate how much of an impact these social media editors really have, focusing on the impact of newspapers’ public pages on Facebook. Since the actions of individual users are not visible on many platforms due to privacy consideration, we propose a method that leverages time series of aggregated scores for total user engagement, which are available for various platforms. We use this method to study and compare the influence of Facebook pages for six newspapers from the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Flanders, for all news items published over 2 weeks in 2017.