Analysis of information cascading and propagation barriers across distinctive news events

Abstract

News reporting, on events that occur in our society, can have different styles and structures, as well as different dynamics of news spreading over time. News publishers have the potential to spread their news and reach out to a large number of readers worldwide. In this paper we would like to understand how well they are doing it and which kind of obstacles the news may encounter when spreading. The news to be spread wider cross multiple barriers such as linguistic (the most evident one, as they get published in other natural languages), economic, geographical, political, time zone, and cultural barriers. Observing potential differences between spreading of news on different events published by multiple publishers can bring insights into what may influence the differences in the spreading patterns. There are multiple reasons, possibly many hidden, influencing the speed and geographical spread of news. This paper studies information cascading and propagation barriers, applying the proposed methodology on three distinctive kinds of events: Global Warming, earthquakes, and FIFA World Cup. Our findings suggest that 1) the scope of a specific event significantly effects the news spreading across languages, 2) geographical size of a news publisher’s country is directly proportional to the number of publishers and articles reporting on the same information, 3) countries with shorter time-zone differences and similar cultures tend to propagate news between each other, 4) news related to Global Warming comes across economic barriers more smoothly than news related to FIFA World Cup and earthquakes and 5) events which may in some way involve political benefits are mostly published by those publishers which are not politically neutral.