Ducci, G., Artieri, G. B., Corsi, M., Giglietto, F., & Manattini, F. (2022). Media, Users And Health Online: The Propagation Dynamics Of Digital Information On Facebook And The Role Of The Online Gatekeeper Google News Italia. UNICApress.
Summary
This conference paper investigates how Google News Italia functions as an algorithmic gatekeeper for health information and how the news it aggregates translates into user engagement on Facebook. Drawing on health communication scholarship and classic gatekeeping/agenda-setting theory, the authors analyze nine months (Feb–Nov 2019) of health-related items surfaced by Google News Italia, matching each to Facebook interaction data. They argue that while medical-scientific and healthcare-system topics dominate aggregation, emotionally charged items — celebrity health stories and healthcare malfunction reports — command the greatest user engagement. The paper contends that algorithmic gatekeepers now play a non-negligible role in constructing digital public spheres around health, with dual implications for health literacy and misinformation.
Key Contributions
- Empirical mapping of Google News Italia’s gatekeeping role in shaping the Italian online health agenda.
- A seven-category thematic coding scheme for health news suitable for reuse in agenda-setting and audience research.
- A comparison index (Ic) distinguishing comment- vs. share-oriented engagement modalities.
- A theoretical bridging of health communication, gatekeeping theory, and platform-based engagement analysis.
- Practical implications for health organizations planning strategic communication in algorithmically mediated environments.
Methods
Quantitative content analysis combined with platform data collection. Custom software polled Google News Italia RSS feeds every two hours across health, medicine, mental health, nutrition, and fitness categories, yielding 12,080 items, of which 9,456 received at least one Facebook interaction (collected via the Graph API for the week after publication). The top 10% most-engaged items (960 articles) were manually coded by five coders into seven thematic categories (Krippendorff’s α = 0.58). Analysis included frequency distributions across topics, source-level breakdowns for the 25 most productive outlets, and the Ic index comparing comments to shares.
Findings
- 78.3% of aggregated health items received at least one Facebook interaction.
- Medical science (18.5%) and healthcare system (18.4%) dominated the highly-engaged set; celebrity was rarest (5.3%).
- Celebrity news drove the highest average engagement (1,862 interactions per item) and disproportionate commenting.
- Shares outnumbered comments overall; technical topics skewed toward sharing, celebrity content toward commenting.
- Production was concentrated: news agencies (esp. Ansa) and national dailies led, and 1% of sources produced 17% of items.
- Sources showed thematic specialization (e.g., Quotidiano Sanità on system news, Vanity Fair on celebrity, Fanpage on malfunctions).
- Within-source engagement variance exceeded between-source variance, indicating article-level topic matters more than outlet identity.
Connections
This study sits within the Italian media ecosystem literature and connects to work on platform gatekeeping and algorithmic curation of information — notably Rossi2023-847d5a9f, Ghezzi2023-8bebc91f, and Marino2023-9137f448 on the Italian context. Its concern with how emotionally charged or contested health content propagates and outperforms scientific reporting resonates with research on coordinated sharing and misinformation dynamics such as Giglietto2019-882f1900, Giglietto2019-e9be81c1, and Giglietto2022-0e951ac5. More broadly, it complements platform-level engagement studies like Gonzalez-Bailon2024-rq on how curation shapes exposure to news.