From the fringes to the mainstream: Measuring cross-platform information flows in digital alternative news environments

Fringe social media platforms, sometimes referred to as alternative platforms, are often seen as spaces that provide a potential nurturing ground for misinformation and extreme political opinions. At the same time, a lot of users are active on several platforms, both fringe and mainstream. Some will source content from fringe platforms and reshare it on mainstream platforms. In this study we develop an approach to analyze the flow of content from fringe to mainstream social media platforms by tracing the sharing of URLs. We distinguish between content flows characterized by authentic and inauthentic coordination as well as organic information flows. The study is based on a large sample of URLs shared by accounts with a propensity for sharing German alternative news articles alongside a variety of other types of both anti-mainstream and mainstream-oriented content. We trace roughly 10 million URLs posted between January 2019 and March 2022 across the mainstream platforms Facebook and Twitter (X) and the fringe platforms Telegram, Vkontakte, Gab and 4chan. Our results show that around 10% of all URLs shared on mainstream platforms were first shared on a fringe platform. 1% can be characterized as organic inflow from a fringe platform, 1% as authentic coordination, while 0.5% was due to inauthentic coordination. The results also reveal the existence of an interconnected network of almost 1000 accounts involved both in the coordinated inflow of URLs from fringe to mainstream platforms as well as the coordinated re-sharing of the same URLs on mainstream platforms. We show how this network was established as part of the anti-restriction, anti-lockdown and anti-vaccination movement in Germany during 2020 and 2021 following the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, results indicate that this coordinated network was repurposed to disseminate pro-Russian content after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in spring 2022.