Predicting reposting latency of news content in social media: A focus on issue attention, temporal usage pattern, and information redundancy

Abstract

Social media platforms are increasingly being used as important sources for obtaining various types of information in the current digital age. While an increasing number of studies have investigated the factors that influence user's news content sharing behavior, few have paid attention to the reposting latency of online news contents. Reposting latency refers to the delay of interval time between original post publish time and repost time. Reposting activity on social media is an important type of user feedback behavior to the message received. The speed of the response could reflect user's processing efficiency and capacity. This study examined the possible factors that may influence users' reposting latency of news contents on social media. In doing so, we employed a multilevel negative binomial model to examine the impacts of issue attention, temporal usage pattern, and information redundancy. Our findings show that multiple issues could distract user's attention, thus leading to the low reposting speed. We also found a distributed temporal usage pattern could help shorten reposting time, while information redundancy and information overload could increase the reposting latency of news contents on social media. The findings of this study can contribute to advancing the understanding of news consumption behavior on social media. The conclusions have the potential to help in explaining and further predicting the success of news diffusion.