Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

7-2017

Abstract

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.

Keywords

online news, demographics, news sharing, social media, Twitter

Discipline

Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing | Social Media

Research Areas

Data Science and Engineering

Publication

Proceedings of the 28th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, HT 2017, Prague, Czech Republic, July 4 -7

First Page

195

Last Page

204

ISBN

9781450347082

Identifier

10.1145/3078714.3078734

Publisher

ACM

City or Country

New York

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