Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

5-2013

Abstract

With the development of social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter, mainstream media organizations including newspapers and TV media have played an active role in engaging with their audience and strengthening their influence on the recently emerged platforms. In this paper, we analyze the behavior of mainstream media on Twitter and study how they exert their influence to shape public opinion during the UK's 2010 General Election. We first propose an empirical measure to quantify mainstream media bias based on sentiment analysis and show that it correlates better with the actual political bias in the UK media than the pure quantitative measures based on media coverage of various political parties. We then compare the information diffusion patterns from different categories of sources. We found that while mainstream media is good at seeding prominent information cascades, its role in shaping public opinion is being challenged by journalists since tweets from them are more likely to be retweeted and they spread faster and have longer lifespan compared to tweets from mainstream media. Moreover, the political bias of the journalists is a good indicator of the actual election results.

Discipline

Databases and Information Systems

Research Areas

Data Science and Engineering

Publication

Proceedings of the 24th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (Hypertext 2013)

First Page

174

Last Page

178

Identifier

10.1145/2481492.2481512

Publisher

ACM Press

City or Country

Paris, France

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1145/2481492.2481512

Download

Share

COinS