Researchers show that the 18/O triggered the viralization of alternative journalism media 

April 2022. Following the popular revolt of October 2019, social network users significantly increased the circulation of alternative media content over traditional media. This is one of the main conclusions obtained by researchers at the Millennium Institute Foundational Research on Data (IMFD), based on an analysis of Facebook interactions of 1,221,487 publications from 31 media outlets, collected from 10 months before to 10 months after O/18.

The article was published by three IMFD research associates: Juan Pablo Luna(School of Government and Institute of Political Science at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile), Sergio Toro(Department of Political Science at the Universidad de Concepción), and Sebastián Valenzuela(School of Communications at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile) in the journal Social Media + Society (indexed in quartile 1 in Web of Science) in the first quarter of this year. It reveals that after the social explosion , a substantial change was generated in the way users share news on social networks, specifically those of conventional and alternative digital media.

"We identified that there was an increase in the levels of interaction with news produced by television, radio and internet media, which quickly returned to normal levels. However, with the alternative media, the increase in the rate of interactions was maintained for much longer," explains Sebastián Valenzuela. 

The research documents a relationship between the actions of Facebook users with the news and the spread of the protests that followed the 18/O. To carry out the research, they analyzed the news published between January 2019 and July 2020 using CrowdTangle, Facebook's analytics platform that allows to analyze interactions with content of a public nature on this social network. 

The researchers studied 18 Facebook pages in the case of traditional media, including the country's best-known television, radio and magazine networks, such as ADN, Biobío, Emol and 24 Horas. 

For alternative media, we analyzed media established before October 18, 2019. One of them was the "Red de Medios de los Pueblos", independent news sites formed in 2009, and of which El Observatodo, El Ciudadano and Mapuexpress were examined. Also included were a large number of alternative media that only exist digitally and are characterized, for the most part, by a more progressive editorial line. 

The results of the article showed that, after the social outburst, alternative media increased their interactions by 15 times their number of references, which corresponds to a level 10 times higher than what was observed in traditional media. 

The rise of alternative media is consistent with the rejection of established or dominant institutions, such as the traditional media in Chile, explains Valenzuela. 

"The behavior of both types of media was very different. While the traditional media seemed to become echo chambers of the government and the elite, most of the alternative media acted in contradiction with the government's discourses", concludes Juan Pablo Luna.