Dissemination Biases of Social Media Channels: On the Topical Coverage of Socially Shared News

Authors

  • Abhijnan Chakraborty Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur
  • Saptarshi Ghosh Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology Shibpur
  • Niloy Ganguly Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur
  • Krishna P. Gummadi Max Planck Institute for Software Systems

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v10i1.14802

Abstract

In a marked departure from traditional offline media, where all subscribers of a particular news media source (e.g., New York Times) used to get the same news stories through printed newspapers, online news media presents multiple options for the readers to consume news. For example, the subscribers of a media source can get news directly from the news website, or from what their peers share over social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. It is, however, unclear whether there are any differences in the news disseminated on these different online channels. In this work, we analyze data from a popular online news media site (nytimes.com), and show that each of these different channels tends to highlight some types of stories more than other stories. We believe that consumers of online news as well as media organizations need to be aware of such differences in various online news dissemination channels.

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Published

2021-08-04

How to Cite

Chakraborty, A., Ghosh, S., Ganguly, N., & Gummadi, K. P. (2021). Dissemination Biases of Social Media Channels: On the Topical Coverage of Socially Shared News. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 10(1), 559-562. https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v10i1.14802