Social Media & Society 2020

News Diffusion on Twitter: Comparing the Dissemination Careers for Mainstream and Marginal News

Axel Bruns and Tobias Keller

• 22 July 2020 – Social Media & Society 2020 conference, online

Current scholarly as well as mainstream media discussion expresses substantial concerns about the influence of ‘problematic information’ from hyperpartisan and downright fraudulent news sources on public debate and public opinion formation. Some recent studies present evidence that such marginal, hyperpartisan and propagandist sites are outpacing their more mainstream counterparts in the dissemination of content: put simply, ‘fake news’ content seems to spread more quickly across social networks than ‘real news’. The generalisability of such findings is limited, however, by the source data: for instance, to establish a comparison between ‘real’ and ‘fake’ news, Vosoughi et al. (2018) consider only news stories that were evaluated by a fact-checking organisation. To further investigate this question and extend our evidence base, this work-in-progress paper examines the sharing patterns for all major stories on selected mainstream and marginal news sites, independent of whether they have received external fact-checking. We do so to determine whether there are typical and divergent ‘dissemination careers’ on Twitter for the news stories published by each site, and subsequently to examine whether any differences in these typical dissemination patterns result from differences in the promotional strategies employed by the sites themselves, from differences in the audiences they address, or from the artificial boosting of content dissemination through legitimate or nefarious means.

Video of the Presentation

Presentation Slides

The work-in-progress paper, focussing on a single month of data rather than the full year analysed in the presentation above, is online here.