The same views, the same news? A 15-country study on news sharing on social media by European politicians

Social media allow politicians to circumvent the gatekeeping role of news media by providing a platform on which they can communicate directly with and to their electorates. Still, politicians share news items on their online platforms to promote themselves, criticize their opponents or to inform their following. Doing so, they signal the relevance of those news items and the outlets that published them to their online audiences, serving as secondary gatekeepers in the flow of information. In this paper, we study the ideological link between politicians and the audiences of the outlets they share on social media. Combining comparative survey data (N = 22,145) with Facebook posts (N = 21,061) by 2,142 MPs in 15 European countries, we assess whether the ideological alignment with news outlets’ audiences drives politicians’ online news sharing. Findings confirm that the ideological alignment between a politician and a news outlet’s audience predicts the politician’s sharing of news by that outlet. Moreover, this connection is stronger for radical party politicians and in media systems that are characterized by higher levels of political parallelism. The results have important implications for partisan selective exposure to news and polarization in the digital information environment.