How Right-Wing Media, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube Circulated Antipathy and Threat Cues About Immigrants: A Cross-Media and Cross-Platform Approach

Research on hybrid media systems and intermedia agenda-setting concerns how information flows across various forms of media. However, most of this work focuses on news media and Twitter, overlooking connections among different social media platforms. Our cross-media and cross-platform approach to studying information flows emphasizes how journalistic and user practices drive information flows across news and social media while also suggesting methodological strategies for empirical investigation (i.e. tracing the sharing of identical content and modeling the spread of semantically similar content). Applying this approach, we analyze the flow of anti-immigrant cues in the right-wing media system, investigating how generalized antipathy and specific threat cues about immigrants reverberate across right-wing news media outlets and right-wing users on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. By collecting news headlines and social media posts and conducting manual coding, supervised machine learning, and time series analysis, we identify frequent bi-directional information flows between right-wing news media and Twitter as well as YouTube’s leading role in propagating anti-immigrant cues across news and social media. These findings highlight the value of the cross-media and cross-platform approach for understanding media system hybridity, intermedia agenda-setting dynamics, and platform differences and interconnections.