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

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

Summary

This article traces how Sky News Australia, a low-rated News Corp cable channel, leveraged Facebook and YouTube between 2020 and 2021 to become a transnational node in the global right-wing media ecosystem. Combining cross-platform data collection, network analysis, and BERTopic modelling, Copland, Bruns, and Graham argue that Sky News Australia pursues a two-pronged digital strategy: native Facebook video serves a domestic Australian right-wing audience with parochial content, while YouTube uploads — disproportionately focused on US politics, COVID-19, and conspiracy narratives like the “Great Reset” — are absorbed into the American right-wing propaganda pipeline. The paper extends Benkler et al.’s network propaganda framework across national borders and argues that the channel exemplifies infrastructural, computational, and participatory propaganda forms adapted to algorithmic platforms.

Key Contributions

  • First systematic empirical mapping of Sky News Australia’s cross-platform dissemination on Facebook and YouTube.
  • Geographic extension of the network propaganda framework, showing asymmetric right-wing media ecosystems are transnational, not US-bound.
  • A replicable methodological pipeline combining CrowdTangle, text-based cross-platform video matching, network visualisation, and BERTopic modelling.
  • Application of “infrastructural” and “participatory” propaganda concepts to a non-US partisan outlet.
  • A template research agenda for comparable channels (Fox News, GB News, Rebel News).

Methods

The authors collected the 20,000 most recent Sky News Australia YouTube videos (March 2020 – January 2021) via the Digital Methods Initiative’s YouTube Data Tools, then queried CrowdTangle for both Facebook posts linking to those videos and native Sky News Australia Facebook video posts. A text-matching procedure aligned YouTube and Facebook content. Temporal analysis by hour, week, and administrator country was paired with Gephi/Force Atlas 2 network visualisation of video-sharing relationships, and BERTopic modelling (KeyBERTInspired, UMAP, HDBSCAN, 1–3 n-grams) over 19,957 video descriptions yielded 111 topics.

Findings

  • Of 20,000 YouTube videos, only 3,470 were shared on Facebook (22,282 posts across 7,955 spaces); 11,660 native Facebook videos generated 37,350 posts in 5,184 spaces.
  • Native Facebook video sharing peaks in Australian evening hours, while YouTube sharing is globally distributed with a US-daytime bump.
  • Top native-Facebook sharers are Australian right-wing pages and Sky presenters; top YouTube sharers are US right-wing pages (Tucker Carlson, Mark Levin, Lauren Southern, Kayleigh McEnany Fan Club).
  • YouTube sharing roughly doubled from October 2020, tracking the US election and voter-fraud claims, with rising US-administered page activity.
  • Network visualisation reveals two clusters — a dense Australian native-Facebook cluster and a dispersed US-focused YouTube cluster — bridged by globally themed conspiracist content.
  • The top 20 topics (60.66% of videos) span COVID/anti-lockdown, partisan critique (pro-Trump/anti-Biden, pro-LNP/anti-Labor), China-focused content, and pro-fossil-fuel economic framing.
  • Five overtly disinformation topics (~2% of videos: voter fraud, Great Reset/climate denial, hydroxychloroquine, Hunter Biden laptop, wildfires-as-climate-denial) often achieved the highest sharing counts.

Connections

This study sits alongside other work on transnational right-wing media ecosystems and hyperpartisan cross-platform amplification: it complements Waight2026-ts and Waight2025-al on Australian partisan media, Starbird2025-jj on participatory disinformation (a framework the authors explicitly extend), and Marwick2025-ov and Donovan2025-ws on networked propaganda dynamics. Its cross-platform sharing methodology resonates with Graham2025-gp, Bollenbacher2026-vz, and Gonzalez-Bailon2024-rq on platform-level diffusion of partisan content, while its focus on COVID and election conspiracies links to DeVerna2025-dl and Prochaska2025-ef.

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