Sky News Australia as network propaganda: how a niche cable channel became an international right-wing propaganda machine

Copland, S., Bruns, A., & Graham, T. (2025). Sky News Australia as network propaganda: how a niche cable channel became an international right-wing propaganda machine. Media International Australia. https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878x251406899

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Summary

This paper traces how Sky News Australia — a low-rated, News Corp–owned right-wing cable channel — reinvented itself as an internationally influential digital media operation between 2020 and 2021. Combining cross-platform data from YouTube and Facebook (via CrowdTangle) with temporal, network, and topic-modelling analysis, the authors argue that the channel operates a deliberate two-pronged strategy: serving committed domestic right-wing audiences with native Facebook content, while inserting itself into the US right-wing propaganda pipeline through YouTube videos that amplify conspiracy theories about COVID-19, the 2020 US election, and the “Great Reset.” Theoretically, the paper extends Benkler et al.’s network propaganda framework across national borders, positioning Sky News Australia as a transnational node bridging Australian and American media ecosystems.

Key Contributions

• First systematic empirical mapping of Sky News Australia’s transnational digital dissemination across Facebook and YouTube.
• Geographically extends Benkler et al.’s (2018) network propaganda framework, showing asymmetric right-wing media ecosystems span national boundaries.
• Introduces a replicable methodological pipeline combining CrowdTangle data, cross-platform video matching via text comparison, network visualisation, and BERTopic modelling.
• Develops and applies concepts of “infrastructural” and “participatory” propaganda to a non-US case.
• Offers a research agenda for comparable channels such as Fox News, GB News, and Rebel News.

Methods

• Collected the 20,000 most recent Sky News Australia YouTube videos (30 March 2020 – 21 January 2021) via the Digital Methods Initiative’s YouTube Data Tools.
• Queried CrowdTangle for Facebook posts (April 2020 – January 2021) linking to these videos, plus native Facebook video posts from the channel’s page.
• Used text-matching between YouTube descriptions and Facebook message fields to link video instances across platforms.
• Performed temporal analysis of posting patterns by hour and week, broken down by administrator country.
• Built network visualisations in Gephi (Force Atlas 2) mapping video-sharing relationships between videos and Facebook spaces.
• Applied BERTopic modelling (KeyBERTInspired, UMAP, HDBSCAN, 1–3 n-grams) to 19,957 video descriptions, yielding 111 topics.

Findings

• Of 20,000 YouTube videos, only 3,470 were shared on Facebook (22,282 posts); 11,660 native Facebook videos generated 37,350 posts.
• Native Facebook videos circulate mostly within Australian time zones; YouTube video sharing is globally distributed with a slight US-daytime peak.
• Top native-Facebook sharers are Australian right-wing pages and Sky presenters (Peta Credlin, Alan Jones, Mark Latham); top YouTube sharers are US-centric pages (Tucker Carlson, Lauren Southern, Mark Levin).
• YouTube sharing roughly doubled from October 2020, coinciding with the US election and Trump’s voter-fraud claims, with a rise in US-administered pages.
• Network visualisation reveals two clusters — a dense Australian cluster (native Facebook) and a dispersed US-focused cluster (YouTube) — joined by a transitional zone of globally themed conspiracist content.
• Top 20 topics (60.66% of videos) span four themes: COVID/anti-lockdown, political bias, global/national concerns (especially China), and pro-fossil-fuel economic policy.
• Five topics (~1 in 50 videos) explicitly disseminate misinformation — 2020 voter fraud, climate denial and the Great Reset, hydroxychloroquine, the Hunter Biden laptop, and wildfire climate denial — often with the highest sharing counts.

Connections

This paper shares authorship and an interest in Australian and cross-platform propaganda dynamics with Graham2025-gp and Hurcombe2025-cs. Its focus on transnational right-wing media ecosystems and coordinated dissemination connects it to work on participatory disinformation and networked propaganda such as Starbird2025-jj and Marwick2025-ov, while its concern with cross-national information disorder resonates with comparative studies like Humprecht2025-ml and Cazzamatta2026-lo.

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