How Social Media Metrics Shape News Production: A Replication Study

Audience engagement signals on social media platforms have shaped how media outlets produce news. Mukerjee et al. examined this phenomenon empirically by estimating the extent to which media outlets respond to audience engagement signals on Facebook in deciding what news to publish on the platform. However, the extent to which their findings can be generalized to other social media platforms remains unknown. We replicate their study on Twitter using the same methodological pipeline ( <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline" overflow="scroll"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi>N</mml:mi> <mml:mo>≈</mml:mo> <mml:mn>4</mml:mn> <mml:mo>.</mml:mo> <mml:mn>55</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> million posts, twenty-eight media outlets, between 2015 and 2019). Our results indicate that media responsiveness to audience engagement on Twitter aligns with the core patterns identified in the Facebook study. Specifically, topics receiving higher audience engagement generally experience significantly increased coverage shortly thereafter, and the responsiveness is not conditioned on the nature of topics. However, we observe three differences in dynamics on Twitter compared to Facebook: first, the maximum response window on Twitter is shorter; second, conservative outlets on Twitter are not more likely to respond to engagement signals; third, platform-specific metrics (e.g., retweets) show different patterns of responsiveness. Our replication thus highlights the generalizability of the original study while underscoring the importance of platform-specific characteristics in shaping media production on social media.