Short answer
Increasingly to the news. Own sites took 58% of parties' link posts in 2010 and 35% to 39% from 2016, while news media rose from 17% to between 36% and 43% a year from 2017.
What the evidence shows
- The study classifies the destinations of 410,308 link posts from 112 party pages and 74 leaders' pages in 20 European countries from 2010 to 2020; hand-built lists cover 95% of link posts.
- Video platforms, mostly YouTube, peaked at 14% of link posts in 2014 and then fell to about 2%.
- Leaders' pages linked much more to news and much less to their own sites than party pages did.
- Comparing posts by the same page in the same country and month, links to news drew the most engagement; links to own sites drew about 18% fewer interactions, video links 24% fewer, and links to events, petitions and other campaign tools 86% fewer.
- Populist parties did not link detectably more to their own sites or less to news than other parties.
Caveats
Links are classified by website, not by what the linked page says, and engagement is not clicks. A cross-national list of alternative news outlets could not be built defensibly, so that comparison is not made.