ABSTRACT
The impact of media globalisation on audiences is the subject of an increasing abundance of research, from a multitude of different perspectives. National media systems also vary in the depth and quality of their international news coverage. The network structure of social media also makes it relatively easy to trace the networks of political activists, which in turn makes it easy for authoritarian regimes to disrupt these networks. In this way the Internet platforms are benefitting from mainstream media producing the news and people who share it online. The structure of the Internet does indeed allow news to flow across national boundaries and people to follow real-time news of events in New York, Istanbul and Moscow from anywhere in the world. While authoritarian regimes use various methods to reject the flow of material coming into their countries, people are also now seeing the spread of counter-narratives from regimes that, in the past, have been excluded from the global news hegemony.
