Frontiers: Does Carrying News Increase Engagement with Non-News Content on Social Media Platforms?

Yu Song () and Puneet Manchanda ()
Additional contact information
Yu Song: Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109
Puneet Manchanda: Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109

Marketing Science, 2025, vol. 44, issue 4, 748-759

Abstract: The rapid growth of online news aggregators has intensified the debate over whether they should compensate news publishers for redistributing news content. Regulators worldwide are working to develop policies that balance the interests of both parties. However, there is limited understanding of the impact of carrying news on news aggregators, especially on their non-news content. Our research fills this gap by examining the impact of news on non-news user engagement and content generation on Facebook. We utilize a natural experiment—the Facebook Australia news shutdown in 2021—and apply a difference-in-differences approach to quantify these effects. We find that, in the short run, both user engagement and content generation of non-news content on Facebook decreased after the news shutdown. Moreover, the effects were more pronounced for non-news posts with negative sentiment and higher popularity as well as for non-news accounts that are more socially active, experienced, and verified. These results highlight the positive spillover effects of news on non-news content and provide timely and relevant insights for regulators, news publishers, social media platforms that carry news, and content creators on social media platforms.

Keywords: news publishers; news aggregators; social media; user engagement; user-generated content; difference-in-differences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2024.0993 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ormksc:v:44:y:2025:i:4:p:748-759

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Marketing Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().