News Sharing on Twitter: A Nationally Comparative Study

Authors

  • Axel Bruns Digital Media Research Centre
  • Brenda Moon Digital Media Research Centre
  • Felix Münch Digital Media Research Centre
  • Jan-Hinrik Schmidt
  • Lisa Merten
  • Hallvard Moe Department of Information Science and Media Studies
  • Sander Schwartz Department of Digital Culture and Mobile Communication

Keywords:

news, social media, Twitter, international comparisons, longitudinal study

Abstract

The utility of Twitter as a medium for public engagement with news events has been well documented. Research has particularly highlighted the importance of Twitter as a space for the rapid assembly of ad hoc publics (Bruns & Burgess, 2015) around breaking news events, aided also by the availability of hashtags as a flexible mechanism for collecting all tweets marked as relevant to a specific topic (Rambukkana, 2015). In this, Twitter arguably even surpasses Facebook, as its flat, non-reciprocal, weak-tie network facilitates the dissemination of news more effectively than the hierarchical, reciprocal, strong-tie structure implemented by Facebook (Dewan & Kumaraguru, 2014). Much less is known about the platform’s performance in day-to-day news sharing and the news engagement practices of users outside of periods of heightened attention. Addressing this gap in the literature, this paper presents the first results from a major, long-term, internationally comparative study of news sharing on Twitter. Gathering Twitter data since mid-2012, we have managed – within the limitations set by the public Twitter API – to capture all tweets linking to a large selection of news sites in Australia, Germany, and the Nordic countries; our analysis of these data shows the distribution of attention to these sites, the dynamics of such marketshare over time, and the structure of each nation’s news-sharing user populations on Twitter, as well as comparing these patterns across the countries against the backdrop of their respective media ecologies.

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Published

2016-10-31

How to Cite

Bruns, A., Moon, B., Münch, F., Schmidt, J.-H., Merten, L., Moe, H., & Schwartz, S. (2016). News Sharing on Twitter: A Nationally Comparative Study. AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research, 6. Retrieved from https://spir.aoir.org/ojs/index.php/spir/article/view/8752

Issue

Section

Papers B