News circulation on social media platforms: A longitudinal study of news sharing and source diversity

Abstract

This study investigates the extent to which Dutch-language Twitter did reflect a diverse news ecosystem by examining how structurally distinct news sources were shared between 2016 and 2022. While platforms are often seen as democratizing news distribution, few studies have analyzed how different media categories adapt to the same infrastructural conditions over time. Drawing on a longitudinal large-scale dataset of tweets containing URLs, we measure both source diversity and relative prominence across four media categories (newspapers, broadcasters, online news platforms, and other sources). Findings reveal a convergence in diversity across institutional actors, suggesting isomorphic adaptation to platform logics. However, this structural convergence is accompanied by divergent prominence: legacy newspapers grow more prominent, while diverse but marginal categories (broadcast media, online news media, and other sources) decline. Twitter emerges as an infrastructural filter that reshapes news distribution online. The Dutch case, marked by high public trust and digital saturation, offers new insights into how platformization (re)structures authority and diversity in hybrid news environments.

In the transition from mass media to digital platforms, Twitter, now X, has played an important role due to its real-time information-sharing infrastructure and algorithmic design which prioritizes speed, visibility, and virality (Castro et al., 2023; Kumar and Jha, 2022). Compared to other platforms, Twitter has long been favored by journalists, politicians, and engaged publics for breaking news and political commentary (Broersma, 2022; Bruns et al., 2016; Ershov and Morales, 2024; Esteve Del Valle et al., 2022; Wischnewski et al., 2021). Retweets, hashtags, and trending topics, enabled the rapid diffusion of news content, often collapsing the boundary between professional journalism and user-generated material (Park et al., 2020; Younas and Owda, 2021). This has raised doubts about the credibility of news, the authority of legacy media institutions, and the evolving nature of public discourse in platform-mediated environments (Patro and Rathore, 2020).

While X has become less important in the current media landscape (Groot Kormelink and Lamot, 2025), Twitter’s role between 2016 and 2022 was instrumental in (re)shaping how news circulated, was interpreted, and contested. News organizations adapted to platform logics, altering how institutional actors interacted with audiences and with one another (Van Dijck and Poell, 2013; Van Es and Poell, 2020). They commonly used Twitter to share stories and refer people to their own platform, while individual users also shared links to news articles. Understanding this phase is crucial for tracing how digital infrastructures redefined journalistic authority and practice. Although Twitter-turned-X’s position in the platform ecology has changed, a retrospective longitudinal analysis provides insights into both its previous function and how platform logics work.

We analyze Dutch-language tweets from 2016 to 2022, a period of relative platform stability marked by two national elections, the COVID-19 pandemic, rising populism, and international political unrest such as the Brexit and the George Floyd protests resulting in the Black Lives Matter movement. The Dutch case offers a relevant setting: it combines high digital connectivity (Newman et al., 2025), widespread Twitter adoption, and a hybrid media ecology where legacy outlets coexist with digital-native and alternative news sources (Majó-Vázquez et al., 2020). In this environment, online prominence is not secured by institutional status alone but depends on how media adapt to platform logics. Yet little is known about how different media adjust to the same infrastructural conditions over time.

The Dutch media system is highly concentrated, which raises concerns about viewpoint diversity. By 2016, two Flemish-owned conglomerates, DPG Media and Mediahuis, controlled over 80% of newspaper circulation. These outlets dominate circulation and social media visibility, operating across the Netherlands and Flanders as a de facto single market (Ayling, 2023). At the same time, the Netherlands differs from more polarized systems such as the United States or the United Kingdom (Vliegenhart et. al., 2011; Zhu et al., 2025). Public trust in news remains comparatively high: according to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report, 50% of audiences trust news, with Nederlandse Omroep Stichting (NOS) and local broadcasters ranked as the most reliable sources (Newman et al., 2025).

The combination of ownership concentration, cross-border integration, and enduring trust creates a distinctive context for analyzing how institutional actors adapt to platform conditions and how their prominence evolves within Twitter’s news ecology. We address this gap by analyzing how different media (broadcast, newspapers, online, and other sources) have been shared on Twitter, and how their source diversity and relative prominence change over time. Diversity is understood here as the range of distinct news sources represented within each media category.

We ask:

• RQ1. To what extent did Dutch-language Twitter reflect a diverse news ecosystem between 2016 and 2022?

• RQ2. How did the number of shared URLs to legacy media, broadcasters, online platforms, and other news sources compare on Dutch-language Twitter between 2016 and 2022?

By tracing patterns of source diversity and prominence across categories, this study offers new insight into the restructuring of the news ecosystem under platform conditions. While much of the literature has documented how platforms disrupt traditional journalism, our study points out that they also foster convergence. Structurally distinct actors increasingly adopt similar strategies to remain visible within an environment governed by algorithms and rapidly shifting attention cycles. First, we offer a longitudinal and category-specific analysis of how institutional actors adapt to platform infrastructures. Second, we foreground the role of platform logics in producing convergence among media categories that were previously differentiated by format and professional norms. Third, we provide a detailed case from a non-Anglophone media system, contributing to a more globally informed understanding of platformization and news sharing.

Sharing news content on social media platforms

Unlike traditional media, Twitter operates as a hybrid platform, merging personal interaction with mass communication. This unique structure allows real-time dissemination of news, often outpacing legacy news outlets in breaking stories (Bruns and Highfield, 2015; Hermida, 2010). As a result, Twitter evolved into a “real-time newswire” in which journalists, news organizations, and everyday users simultaneously serve as sources, curators, and consumers of news (Castro et al., 2023; Ershov and Morales, 2024). This shift led news organizations to increasingly tailor their strategies to Twitter’s specific affordances. Unlike Facebook, which emphasized social connectivity and personal feeds, Twitter’s open and flat network architecture supported rapid virality and broad visibility, particularly through hashtags and retweets. Consequently, many outlets prioritized Twitter for distributing (breaking) news and live updates.

The platformization of news on Twitter illustrates how even minor technical changes can significantly reshape the way information circulates (Bucher and Helmond, 2018). Hase et al. (2022) found that German news outlets strategically post more frequently on Twitter than Instagram due to its stronger news orientation, but often fall short in modifying their communicative style to better align with platform engagement norms. In addition, while the existence of “echo chambers,” where users are primarily exposed to information that reinforces their existing beliefs, has been widely discussed (Bucher and Helmond, 2018; Esteve del Valle and Borge, 2018), Fletcher and Nielsen (2018) suggest that social media users may encounter a broader range of viewpoints than those relying solely on traditional media.

Nonetheless, the same algorithms that expose users to diverse content also prioritize engagement, promoting material that is emotionally charged or sensationalist. By favoring content that generates interaction, platforms like Twitter can inadvertently amplify misleading or false information (Campos-Domínguez et al., 2022; Guess et al., 2019). Over time, repeated exposure to such content can increase its perceived accuracy, a phenomenon known as the “illusory truth effect” (Pennycook et al., 2018). While the spread of misinformation is not unique to the digital age, the speed and scale of social media have intensified its reach and impact, making it a central issue in contemporary debates about news consumption and media trust.

In sum, the rise of social media has not only transformed how news is shared but also how it is produced and perceived. Investigating how these platforms afford sharing, consuming, and talking about news is therefore key for understanding the modern-day hybrid-media information system.

Sharing news through hyperlinks

Much of the research on news and information flows on Twitter has concentrated on hashtags and keywords as entry points for analysis (Lotan et. al., 2011; Estrella-Ramón et al., 2024; Weber et al., 2020). This keyword-centric approach is appealing due to the wealth of computational tools available for tracking discursive trends (South et al., 2022). Such methodologies often sideline other crucial data points embedded in tweets, most notably, shared URLs. These may, however, provide richer insights into how news circulates among digital publics.

URL sharing is a core mechanism of news distribution on Twitter, not only as a technical affordance but as a sociopolitical practice that is increasingly shaped by platform dynamics (Ludovico et al., 2020). Hyperlinks function as networked editorial choices, shaping which content becomes visible, trusted, and recirculated. As Holton et al. (2014) argue, URLs enable connective action and articulate users’ positioning within fragmented public spheres. From this perspective, sharing a URL is both a communicative act and a form of networked gatekeeping in a broader media ecosystem. Ludovico et al. (2020) conceptualized hyperlinks as directional connectors that structure a digital topology reflective of authority and intention; those who share the hyperlink demonstrate the intent to share the information shared on the linked webpage. These network traces are not neutral. They reflect how platform-specific mechanisms shape visibility, amplify certain content, and assign credibility within systems of governance and metric prioritization defined by the platform itself (Van Dijck and Poell, 2013).

Empirical studies have pointed to the heightened interactivity of tweets containing URLs (Toraman et al., 2022) and to the motivations behind sharing news links (Lepird et al., 2024; Veltri and Atanasova, 2017). Additional strands of research investigate the epistemic quality of these shared sources, particularly in the context of misinformation and virality (Grinberg et al., 2019; Singh et al., 2020; Törnberg, 2018). Yet these works rarely probe the evolving infrastructural and political conditions that frame hyperlink use. Moreover, they do not take a longitudinal perspective.

An exception is the study by Kwak et al. (2010), which found that approximately 85% of trending discussions on Twitter were news-related. However, it only covers the very early days of Twitter and thus risks obsolescence given the rapid platform transformation since 2009. Because many users still report using Twitter as a news source regardless of its credibility issues (Millet et al., 2024), it is essential to understand how the conditions for news circulation have changed over time. URL sharing must thus be understood not merely as an act of distribution, but as a reflection of an evolving platform.

Source diversity in the online space

News source diversity is widely regarded as a core condition for a pluralistic public sphere, as multiple journalistic actors enable competing perspectives and limit the dominance of single narratives (Magin et al., 2023). In digital environments, however, it is debated whether broader access to information has produced a truly diverse news ecosystem. Some scholars emphasize the pluralizing potential of online media infrastructures (Bucher and Helmond, 2018; Esteve Del Valle, 2022), while others argue that platformization and economic pressures concentrate attention on a limited set of highly visible providers (Fischer and Jarren, 2024).

Much research has explored these dynamics through individual news consumption and repertoires. Patterns of news use are generally stable over time, and trust in mainstream media shapes the breadth of sources engaged with (Andersen et al., 2022; Johansson et al., 2024; Valenzuela et al., 2025). While these studies reveal audience behavior, they provide limited insight into the system-level dynamics that determine which sources gain visibility and how attention is distributed across outlets.

We understand source diversity as the range of distinct news sources represented within each media category on the platform. Drawing on agenda-setting theory (McCombs and Shaw, 1972), repeated sharing of content amplifies certain outlets’ prominence, meaning platforms actively shape which news actors gain visibility. Algorithmic curation and engagement-based ranking further reinforce attention to already prominent sources, producing concentration even in environments with many outlets (Milli et al., 2025).

Structural characteristics of the news industry also constrain source diversity. Economic competition and risk aversion encourage copycat journalism and favor established actors with greater resources and brand recognition, limiting visibility for smaller or alternative outlets. Despite differences in history and production routines, legacy media, broadcasters, and online platforms face similar market pressures, which can result in uneven attention across media categories (de Vries et al., 2022; Freudenthaler and Wessler, 2025).

Together, these perspectives suggest that online source diversity emerges from the interaction of platform-level attention dynamics and structural industry conditions. Understanding how these factors shape visibility across sources is essential for evaluating whether digital platforms foster a pluralistic news ecosystem or reproduce existing hierarchies. This theoretical foundation motivates the examination of source diversity on Dutch-language Twitter between 2016 and 2022.

Methodology

The data for this study were retrieved through the Twi-XL infrastructure, a comprehensive repository of Dutch-language tweets ranging from 2016 to March 2022. The infrastructure supports targeted queries based on tweet characteristics. To identify tweets sharing external content, we filtered for tweets containing at least one URL (N = 224,387,495 tweets). To ensure user anonymity, only the URL string and the tweet timestamp were extracted, rendering the data untraceable to individual accounts. The Twi-XL infrastructure is estimated to contain at least 50% of all Dutch-language tweets during the study period. Figure 1 shows the yearly distribution of tweets from 2016 to 2022 in the Twi-XL infrastructure, highlighting substantial variation in both overall tweet volume and the prevalence of URLs. Importantly, within the Twi-XL infrastructure, retweets are stored as separate tweets. As a result, both original tweets and retweets are included in the analysis, reflecting how often links to news sources circulate on the platform over time.

Figure 1.

Composition of Twi-XL.

Because retweets are counted as separate tweets, highly viral content may disproportionately shape aggregate distributions. The findings should therefore be interpreted as prominence-weighted patterns of news circulation rather than counts of unique links or original posts.

Tweet volume declined between 2016 and 2019, followed by a recovery in 2020–21. The proportion of tweets containing URLs decreased sharply after 2016, indicating possible shifts in user behavior or changes in the conditions under which data could be collected.

Operationalization of the news categories

Previous research indicates that traditional outlets, including public broadcasters, radio, and print newspapers, dominated social media discourses, being linked nearly three times more often than newer media categories between 2015 and 2019 (Farjam et al., 2024). This suggests that established news brands retain considerable influence within information flows despite the rise of digital platforms. Building on this, we introduce a granular classification of news outlets that distinguishes broadcast media, online outlets, newspapers, and other sources, including blogs, news aggregators, and nonprofessional content. These categories reflect distinct institutional histories and production routines, providing a coherent framework to examine how different types of media are positioned within Twitter’s ecology.

Twitter functioned not only as a distribution channel but as a media ecology in which institutional differences persist but are increasingly mediated by the platform’s infrastructural conditions. What is shared, when it is shared, and how it circulates are shaped by the platform’s emphasis on real-time relevance, shareability, and networked amplification (Bucher and Helmond, 2018; Chadwick, 2017). Broadcast media, traditionally oriented around television and radio, have adapted to this environment by integrating digital strategies to maintain visibility in fragmented attention economies. On Twitter, they actively post breaking news, video snippets, and live updates, often optimized for engagement, demonstrating that their role is defined by both legacy status and the ability to adapt to platform affordances (Olsen et al., 2024). Online outlets, in contrast, are structurally aligned with Twitter’s temporal and discursive rhythms. They prioritize customization and engagement, targeting digital-native audiences through platform-optimized formats and embedding themselves within the attention infrastructure of social media (Aral and Zhao, 2019; Levy, 2021; Newman et al., 2024).

Newspapers, historically central to the Dutch media system, have experienced declining print revenues and increasing reliance on paywalls, which limit their reach on social media. Although newspapers have adopted digital-first strategies, these institutional constraints and controlled sharing practices likely tempered their prominence on Twitter in the early years of our study. Research indicates that paywalls reduce site traffic and social media engagement, particularly among younger or casual audiences (Chiou and Tucker, 2013; Oh et al., 2016). In the Netherlands, major publishers initially relied on advertising-based digital revenue models but shifted toward subscription models from around 2011 onward, reflecting broader international trends of declining ad revenue and experimentation with reader-supported journalism (Rußell et al., 2020; Silva and Sanseverino, 2020). These structural factors help explain the selective presence of newspapers on the platform.

The final category, other sources, encompasses nontraditional outlets such as blogs, forums, and citizen journalism platforms. These sources often serve niche or advocacy-driven communities, operate with limited editorial oversight, and exhibit high variability in prominence. While they contribute to the diversity of voices circulating online, their content is not always subject to professional norms of verification or balance (Popovic, 2024).

Together, these categories capture a digitally transitioned media landscape shaped by economic pressures and evolving audience expectations. Twitter amplifies these dynamics by acting both as a distribution channel and as a participatory space in which visibility is contested. In this context, broadcast and online outlets are expected to perform strongly due to their structural fit with the platform, newspapers maintain a selective presence, and other sources display volatility reflecting their heterogeneity and responsiveness to specific discursive communities.

Categorization process

Our categorization process approach focuses on the source (domain), not on the content or framing of individual articles. We processed each URL using a dedicated Python library (UrlParse) to extract domains and develop a rule-based classifier to match each domain with curated lists of news outlets. The news outlets’ classification was constructed by consulting the Nationaal Mediaonderzoek (NMO) registry, cross-referencing relevant Wikipedia pages for Dutch-language media, and reviewing the lists collaboratively among all co-authors to ensure coherence and transparency. The full list is in Supplemental Appendix A. This conservative classification ensures that all URLs categorized as news originate from verifiable, institutionally recognized sources. In doing so, the framework enables longitudinal comparison of news source prominence on Dutch-language Twitter from 2016 to 2022.

The “Other” category plays a central role in our analysis, but must be interpreted cautiously. A key challenge lies in the presence of unresolved shortened URLs (e.g., bit.ly, t.co, tinyurl.com), which obscure the destination domain and thus hinder accurate classification. Due to the scale of the dataset, full expansion of all shortened links via HTTP resolution was not computationally feasible. Our audit of the dataset shows that approximately 10% of all Other URLs from 2016–2022 were associated with popular shortening services, peaking at 24.3% in 2017. These links possibly also include news links that could not be classified as such. However, given these complexities, all unresolved shortened URLs are categorized as part of the “Other” category to avoid overestimation and ensure interpretive clarity. Our classification reflects institutional status at the time of list construction, as verified by all authors of the article, and remains fixed throughout the analysis.

Analysis: measuring source diversity and prominence

To quantify the diversity of shared sources, we use the Shannon Diversity Index (SDI) (Shannon, 1948), a metric that captures both richness (number of unique domains) and evenness (distribution of those domains). Applied to URL data, SDI allows us to assess whether information sharing is concentrated or diffused across different media categories. Higher SDI values indicate a more diverse and evenly distributed environment, while lower values suggest the dominance of a few outlets. Unlike raw domain counts, SDI is sensitive to changes in distribution and therefore suited for temporal comparison such as shifts occurring around elections, crises, or platform policy changes.

Although developed in ecology, SDI has been adapted for digital media research. Torene et. al (2022), for example, apply the index to hashtag use, arguing that it captures structural generality better than momentary prominence. Similarly, in the context of URL sharing, SDI helps identify systemic patterns of concentration or fragmentation in the circulation of news sources on Twitter.

In addition to diversity, we assess relative prominence by examining the proportional share of each media category within the overall dataset. While SDI provides insight into the internal distribution of domains within categories, relative prominence reveals the comparative weight of each category in shaping the overall news environment on the platform.

Importantly, our analysis is based on source prominence through URL presence. We do not include engagement metrics such as likes, retweets, or replies. While these may mediate actual exposure, they fall outside the scope of this study, which is focused on identifying structural changes in the composition and distribution of news sources over time.

Findings

Figure 2 traces the evolution of source diversity in news sharing on Dutch-language Twitter between 2016 and 2022, using SDI. Early trajectories differ across categories, but from 2019 onwards, their SDI scores converge. Newspapers remain relatively stable, while broadcast and online outlets gradually increase in diversity, suggesting that structurally distinct media actors are increasingly shaped by the same platform dynamics.

Figure 2.

Diversity of sources over time by category.

This convergence likely reflects shared infrastructural constraints rather than coordinated strategies. Circulation patterns are shaped less by institutional history or editorial logic alone and more by the platform’s filtering, amplification, and attention metrics. In terms of institutional isomorphism, these dynamics resemble the adoption of similar practices under conditions of uncertainty (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983). As illustrated in Figure 2, platform infrastructures influence how content is distributed and perceived (Bucher and Helmond, 2018; Van Dijck and Poell, 2013).

Figure 3 shows that convergence in diversity does not imply equivalent prominence. Newspapers, though internally concentrated, gain relative visibility over time, challenging assumptions that audiences gravitate toward freely accessible or digital-native outlets (Beseler et. al. 2025; Groot Kormelink, 2023). In contrast, the “Other” category maintains the highest diversity but declines in proportional share, indicating that greater heterogeneity does not guarantee sustained attention. While the platform supports noninstitutional actors, their circulation occurs within a shrinking slice of overall news occurrences.

Figure 3.

Relative prominence of each category over time.

Overall, these patterns reveal a dual transformation: newspapers, broadcasters, and online media converge in circulation while their prominence shifts unevenly, and the highly diverse “Other” category declines. Platform structures reshape their relative visibility within the Dutch Twitter news ecosystem rather than erase differences among media actors.

Newspapers and the stability of platform prominence

The stable internal structure of the newspaper category is evident in Figure 4, which shows circulation consistently concentrated around major titles such as telegraaf.nl and ad.nl. Other national outlets, including nrc.nl, volkskrant.nl, and trouw.nl, maintain stable secondary positions, while smaller regional and Belgian newspapers occupy marginal, largely unchanged roles. This pattern reflects a well-established news market where strong brands retain authority and recognition despite shifts in the platform environment.

Figure 4.

Relative trend of top 20 sources in category: newspapers.

These observations support the notion that historical prominence and brand recognition continue to shape the visibility of established news sources. Circulation patterns suggest that institutional authority extends into platform spaces, reinforced by algorithms that privilege familiar sources and past engagement (George and Hogendorn, 2012). As Ross Arguedas et al. (2022) noted, journalists often perceive platforms as constraining editorial autonomy, prompting newspapers to prioritize control over experimentation. Structural and economic factors further consolidate this effect: ownership concentration standardizes output across titles, reducing content variation and potentially limiting shares (Hendrickx and Van Remoortere, 2024), while reliance on paywalls ensures financial sustainability but restricts open sharing (Chiou and Tucker, 2013; Oh et al., 2016).

Together, these pressures disproportionately limit the reach of smaller and regional outlets, reinforcing the dominance of established brands. Newspapers may not diversify in the way other outlets do, but by maintaining authority while adapting distribution strategies, they sustain prominence. This internal stability likely contributes, under shared platform pressures, to the broader convergence observed among newspapers, broadcasters, and online outlets within Twitter’s news ecology.

Broadcasters join the party

Among the three institutional categories, broadcast media exhibit the most pronounced increase in source diversity, with SDI scores rising steadily between 2016 and 2020. By the end of this period, broadcast media converge with newspapers and online outlets in terms of source diversity, reflecting a shift in how both news organizations and other users engage with platform affordances. Figure 5 shows that nos.nl and rtlnieuws.nl consistently dominate the broadcast category, accounting for most tweets containing URLs. Other broadcasters, including gld.nl, netwerk24.com, sporza.be, and rtvnoord.nl, increase modestly, but the hierarchical structure remains largely unchanged. From 2021 onward, leading outlets retain their positions while regional and Belgian broadcasters gradually expand, broadening the category without altering its overall concentration.

Figure 5.

Relative trend of top 20 sources in category: broadcasters.

These patterns align with previous research on broadcasters’ social media strategies. Broadcasters often extend existing workflows to platforms, prioritizing one-way communication over fully platform-native practices (Herrera-Damas and Hermida, 2014). Local outlets can adapt, but uptake is uneven (Han, 2021). In the Dutch context, public service broadcasters balance new distribution opportunities with values such as universality and diversity, typically adjusting rather than transforming operations (Bardoel and d’Haenens, 2008; Van Es and Poell, 2020). This explains why circulation of broadcaster sources reflects incremental diversification: the layer of outlets expands, yet established brands remain dominant.

A key factor in this process is accessibility. Unlike most Dutch newspapers, broadcast media do not rely on paywalls and are largely supported by public funds, enabling free content distribution. Public trust further reinforces their prominence, as audiences perceive broadcasters as reliable and community-oriented (Swart et al., 2017). This combination of institutional legitimacy and structural accessibility allows broadcasters to maintain strong visibility within the Dutch Twitter news ecosystem.

In sum, broadcast diversity grows through both institutional adaptation and structural advantages: major brands retain authority while smaller outlets gain visibility through open access and trust. This gradual broadening distinguishes broadcasters from the more concentrated newspaper category and illustrates how platform dynamics interact with legacy structures to shape news circulation.

Online news media and the gradual expansion of diversity

Referencing Figures 3 and 6, online outlets have become more visible and diverse, although they remain the least prominent category overall. In the early years, nu.nl dominates the category, but from 2016 onward, its share gradually declines as a broader range of outlets, including geenstijl.nl, dagelijksestandaard.nl, ninefornews.nl, and decorrespondent.nl gain prominence. This diversification reflects broader trends in Dutch news consumption, with younger, digitally literate audiences increasingly relying on online sources (Ministerie van Volksgezondheid and en, 2017) and the rise of right-wing alternative news sources in many areas of the world especially after the COVID-19 pandemic (Boberg et al., 2020; Heft et al., 2020). We see this specifically for ninefornews.nl, which gains recognizable prominence after 2020. Compared to legacy organizations, these outlets demonstrate greater flexibility in content formatting, timing, and engagement, shaped by analytics and performance metrics.

Figure 6.

Relative trend of top 20 sources in category: online news platforms.

Despite this growth, established brands such as nu.nl retain central positions. Figure 6 shows that while nu.nl’s relative share declines, the hierarchical composition of leading sources remains relatively stable. Disrupting large-scale events such as COVID-19, in combination with platform dynamics, might alter the structure of attention on social media to some extent, as we see with ninefornews.com demonstrating growing prominence after 2020. However, algorithmic and audience-driven curation also reinforce existing hierarchies, consistent with research showing that platform openness coexists with the reproduction of power relations (Swart et al., 2017). Moreover, reliance on shared wire services such as the Dutch News Agency (ANP) may constrain content diversity, allowing established outlets to maintain visibility relative to smaller actors (Welbers et al., 2016).

The online category illustrates how Twitter can temporarily expand diversity while ultimately reinforcing hierarchy. Success depends less on institutional legitimacy than on adaptability to platform incentives (Brannon and Roy, 2024). Early gains were achieved by exploiting these incentives, but algorithmic curation, attention competition, and the homogenizing effect of wire services limit further growth, highlighting both the opportunities and structural constraints faced by digital-native actors within the platform-driven news ecology.

Discussion

Our analysis shows that newspapers, broadcasters, and online outlets increasingly dominate the shared URL space on Dutch-language Twitter. From 2019 onwards, diversity scores across these categories converge, suggesting a form of institutional isomorphism (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983) in circulation patterns. Structurally distinct outlets, facing uncertainty and algorithmic pressures, exhibit increasingly similar sharing behaviors, indicating that platform dynamics exert a homogenizing influence on prominence.

Newspapers demonstrate the enduring authority of legacy media. Stable diversity scores combined with rising visibility underscore the recognizability and institutional legitimacy of these outlets within platform-mediated spaces, supporting research on the persistent influence of legacy brands despite the emergence of digital-native competitors (Ross Arguedas et al., 2022; Chiou and Tucker, 2013). Broadcasters follow a more incremental trajectory: while diversity increases, the category remains dominated by established outlets such as NOS and RTL Nieuws, reflecting findings that their prominence might be driven more by public trust and accessibility instead of adaptability (Herrera-Damas and Hermida, 2014; Van Es and Poell, 2020).

Online outlets illustrate the limits of platform-driven diversity. Despite the rise of alternative actors such as nineforenews.nl during the COVID-19 pandemic, established brands like nu.nl retain central positions. New sources temporarily increase visible diversity, but the hierarchy of leading sources remains, showing that algorithmic and audience-driven curation, alongside reliance on wire services such as ANP, reinforce existing power structures (Swart et al., 2017; Welbers et al., 2016). Success depends more on institutional legitimacy than on adaptability to platform incentives (Brannon and Roy, 2024), and early gains are constrained by competitive attention dynamics, algorithmic timelines, and homogenizing content flows. These patterns align with Wang (2023), demonstrating that social media shape public discourse through framing without overturning structural hierarchies.

The “Other” category maintains the highest source diversity but steadily loses share. While the platform allows a broad range of actors, sustained attention is not guaranteed, highlighting the gap between production diversity and prominence. This aligns with critiques that social media create the appearance of openness while reinforcing existing hierarchies (Bucher and Helmond, 2018; Van Dijck and Poell, 2013). Methodological factors, such as unresolved shortened URLs and reliance on a predefined list of Dutch-language sources, may inflate observed diversity, but the declining visibility of these actors reinforces the dominance of established outlets.

Overall, structurally distinct outlets seem to converge in platform practices, yet prominence remains uneven. Newspapers maintain visibility due to historical authority, broadcasters combine accessibility and trust with incremental adaptation, while online outlets exploit platform affordances for temporary attention. Editorial strategy alone no longer determines outcomes; algorithmic infrastructures increasingly structure visibility (Conti et al., 2024). Across platforms, organizations are increasingly shaped by metric-driven priorities, often elevating visibility at the expense of established editorial standards (Mukerjee et al., 2023; Shin et al., 2024). Our findings reflect this pattern. Yet, as Martin (2021) argued, journalism must push back against the gravitational pull of platform metrics and work toward forms of engagement that genuinely serve the public interest.

Comparative Anglophone research reinforces these conclusions. Legacy newspapers often show lower engagement than digital-born outlets due to paywall-oriented models, whereas digital-born actors exploit platform affordances to expand visibility (Yang et al., 2025). In the United Kingdom, legacy broadcasters and newspapers dominate attention, with only a subset of digital-born outlets achieving disproportionate reach (Majó-Vázquez et al., 2017).

Together, these findings highlight that platformized news ecosystems are structured, mediated, and reactive. Legacy and digital-born outlets occupy unequal positions, as institutional authority continues to shape prominence, even while adaptation to platform logics becomes widespread. Converging sharing behaviors indicate that platform dynamics homogenize circulation, but structural inequalities persist. Newspapers and broadcasters maintain stable prominence while “Other” actors experience declining attention despite rising production diversity. Success on platforms is therefore a function of both authority and strategic adaptation, not either factor alone. In the Dutch context, visibility, credibility, and framing converge to shape public discourse, demonstrating that diversity of sources does not automatically translate into diversity of influence.

Conclusion

In response to RQ1, Dutch-language Twitter reflects a structurally convergent but hierarchically uneven news ecosystem. Diversity across media categories increased and converged, yet prominence remained unequal: newspapers strengthened their visibility, broadcasters and online outlets showed only modest gains or plateaued, and “Other” sources declined despite maintaining high diversity.

In response to RQ2, newspapers increasingly dominated URL circulation, while broadcasters and online platforms achieved incremental growth, and “Other” actors lost prominence. These patterns demonstrate that platform-mediated environments foster convergence in circulation behaviors but reinforce the visibility of established actors rather than equalizing attention.

Overall, our study shows that platforms reshape attention without democratizing it. Historical authority, institutional power, and algorithmic mediation continue to structure visibility, while circulation practices become more homogenized. Future research can build on the limitations of our research design. First, our dataset does not identify which accounts shared each URL, preventing distinction between news organizations and individual users, due to privacy regulations. Future work could include account-level data to better understand how institutional and audience-driven factors impact the spread of news. It could integrate user-level data, attention metrics, algorithmic mediation, and framing analyses to fully capture the dynamics of platformed news visibility.

Second, our analysis was restricted to a predefined set of Dutch-language sources, which cannot capture the full spectrum of news sources. We explored using a large language model (LLM) to classify URLs more comprehensively, but source-level classification proved unreliable; access to full article content, titles, or metadata could enable more accurate, scalable approaches, but this was unfeasible at the time of the research. Moreover, comparative work across media systems with varying levels of polarization, regulation, or public trust can clarify whether the observed Dutch patterns reflect a broader trend.

Finally, retweets were included as a valid form of sharing. Highly viral content can disproportionately shape aggregate patterns, amplifying some sources while masking less shared but relevant content. Accounting for visibility-weighted effects in future analyses could better capture the full diversity of circulating news.

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-nms-10.1177_14614448261438469 – Supplemental material for News circulation on social media platforms: A longitudinal study of news sharing and source diversity

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-nms-10.1177_14614448261438469 for News circulation on social media platforms: A longitudinal study of news sharing and source diversity by Iris Marijke Baas, Marc Esteve del Valle, Tommaso Caselli and Marcel Broersma in New Media & Society