Demographics of News Sharing in the U.S. Twittersphere

The widespread adoption and dissemination of online news through social media systems have been revolutionizing many segments of our society and ultimately our daily lives. In these systems, users can play a central role as they share content to their friends. Despite that, little is known about new...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inarXiv.org
Main Authors Reis, Julio C S, Kwak, Haewoon, An, Jisun, Messias, Johnnatan, Benevenuto, Fabricio
Format Paper Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Ithaca Cornell University Library, arXiv.org 10.05.2017
Subjects
Computer Science - Social and Information Networks
Demographics
Digital media
News
Social networks
Spreaders
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Summary:The widespread adoption and dissemination of online news through social media systems have been revolutionizing many segments of our society and ultimately our daily lives. In these systems, users can play a central role as they share content to their friends. Despite that, little is known about news spreaders in social media. In this paper, we provide the first of its kind in-depth characterization of news spreaders in social media. In particular, we investigate their demographics, what kind of content they share, and the audience they reach. Among our main findings, we show that males and white users tend to be more active in terms of sharing news, biasing the news audience to the interests of these demographic groups. Our results also quantify differences in interests of news sharing across demographics, which has implications for personalized news digests.
ISSN:2331-8422
DOI:10.48550/arxiv.1705.03972