Conference Paper: Demographics of News Sharing in the U.S. Twittersphere (Preprint)

The following preprint was recently shared on arXiv. The paper will be presented at the ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (HT’17).
Title
Demographics of News Sharing in the U.S. Twittersphere
Authors
Julio C. S. Reis
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil
Haewoon Kwak
Qatar Computing Research Institute Doha, Qatar
Jisun An
Qatar Computing Research Institute Doha, Qatar
Johnnatan Messias
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil
Fabricio Benevenuto
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil
Source
arXiv.org
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.

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