Dissemination Biases of Social Media Channels: On the Topical Coverage of Socially Shared News

Abstract

In a marked departure from traditional offline media, where all subscribers of a particular news media source (e.g., New York Times) used to get the same news stories through printed newspapers, online news media presents multiple options for the readers to consume news. For example, the subscribers of a media source can get news directly from the news website, or from what their peers share over social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. It is, however, unclear whether there are any differences in the news disseminated on these different online channels. In this work, we analyze data from a popular online news media site (nytimes.com), and show that each of these different channels tends to highlight some types of stories more than other stories. We believe that consumers of online news as well as media organizations need to be aware of such differences in various online news dissemination channels.