17/10/2025 (Friday) 13:00-14:00 E21-G016
News Consumption in the Age of Platformization
Abstract:
The rise of platform power is a defining feature of today’s society, which profoundly shapes how news is consumed and transforming the broader information landscape. How does this trend affect both news consumers and producers? This talk will discuss two recent studies. The first study, based on a large observational tracking dataset in the US, examines how the emerging social media platforms—alongside existing information ecosystems such as the web and TV—influence public news consumption behaviors. The findings reveal that while each platform exhibits distinct patterns of news divides, the overall effect of this multiplatform environment is to exacerbate inequalities in news consumption across the population. The second study focuses on how these individual platformized news behaviors, together with the interplay between news media and platforms, collectively shape power relationships among different actors in the news ecosystem. By integrating several datasets and building a theoretical framework grounded in structuration and platformization theories, this study investigates how social media platforms boost visibilities of digital-born, unreliable, partisan, and mass-oriented news sources compared to the web. Together, these findings offer insights into the ways platformization is reshaping news consumption and influencing the dynamics of today’s information society.
Bio:
Tian Yang is an assistant professor at the School of Journalism and Communication, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research lies at the intersection between digital media, political communication, and computational social science, which particularly looks at people’s information behaviors in the current new media environment across the globe.
