Engagement and interaction with online news: a case study of housing affordability discussions on Facebook

Concerns about housing affordability in Australian capital cities have captured the public and political imagination. How, then, do ordinary citizens discuss the causes of and solutions to the increasing unaffordability of housing? This article examines evidence that branded Facebook channels provide a space for citizens to engage in everyday engagement and interaction on housing issues. We argue that studying branded, public Facebook pages, despite data access limitations, is an important way of tapping into broad citizen sentiment and understanding media influence on topical issues. We also find that different ways of framing housing affordability within news reporting are associated with different patterns of citizen engagement and interaction on Facebook. In particular, generational frames (critically linking housing affordability to either older people’s entrenched economic advantage or young people’s inability to save) are associated with high levels of user engagement, but the lowest level of discussion about policy solutions within dominant comment threads