Identity Groups of News-Sharers on Twitter in the Netherlands

The third speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Iris Baas, whose interest is in the self-identity of Dutch Twitter users who share the news. Twitter is (even now, following its enshittification) a key platform especially for news consumption in the Netherlands, and who is sharing news on the platform is therefore centrally important. Are there district groups of such users, then – and what news do they share?

This project worked with the Twitter bios of such news-sharing users to determine patterns in their identities; it drew on some 400,000 tweets from 2021 (that were still online, from a dataset of 1 million tweets), and the 35 most shared news sources within that dataset; these tweets were posted by some 11,000 individual users.

User bios were then analysed using topic modelling and agglomeration clustering, and this produced five distinctive groups of users: lifestyle and culture (35%), news creators (25%), politics (25%), general (16%), and research and science (3%) – news and political professionals were strongly represented here, but many political users also explicitly identified themselves as non-journalists or politicians.

A handful of major Dutch news organisations dominated the news-sharing patterns: NOS (11%), Telegraaf (11%), and AD (9%) were the most visible. Personal identity and news sources used did not seem to be strongly related, showing perhaps the general focus and use of these news sources. There does not seem to be a strong tendency to selectively pick specific sources.