Audience gatekeeping in business communication: The case of greensill

Abstract

Social media empower their audience to like, comment, and share information. In this way, users become information gatekeepers who direct the attention of the network to certain topics and events. These “audience gatekeeping” processes have been studied quite extensively in the political realm, but hardly any studies refer to the business world. The insolvency of the financial services company Greensill Capital in spring 2021 provides an opportunity to apply this idea to the private sector. Contrary to what political research suggests, audience gatekeeping did not lead to an alternative presentation of issues but, rather, strengthened existing information hierarchies. Common to the political studies, however, is the finding that the direction of users’ attention leads to the extremely unequal distribution of just a handful of titles: Of a total of 943 linked media titles, one quarter of the links connected to just three media titles while half were linked to only once. However, this distribution pattern follows a proportional power-law distribution, as has been found in various studies on media attention, only in a less pronounced form.