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Do we read what we share?: analyzing the click dynamic of news articles shared on Twitter

Published: 15 January 2020 Publication History

Abstract

News and information spread over social media can have big impact on thoughts, beliefs, and opinions. It is therefore important to understand the sharing dynamics on these forums. However, most studies trying to capture these dynamics rely only on Twitter's open APIs to measure how frequently articles are shared/retweeted, and therefore do not capture how many users actually read the articles linked in these tweets. To address this problem, in this paper, we first develop a novel measurement methodology, which combines the Twitter steaming API, the Bitly API, and careful sample rate selection to simultaneously collect and analyze the timeline of both the number of retweets and clicks generated by news article links. Second, we present a temporal analysis of the news cycle based on five-day-long traces (containing both clicks and retweet over time) for the news article links discovered during a seven-day period. Among other things, our analysis highlights differences in the relative timelines observed for clicks and retweets (e.g., retweet data often lags and underestimates the bias towards reading popular links/articles), and helps answer important questions regarding differences in how age-based biases and churn affect how frequently news articles shared on Twitter are accessed over time.

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Cited By

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  • (2021)The Str(AI)ght Scoop: Artificial Intelligence Cues Reduce Perceptions of Hostile Media BiasDigital Journalism10.1080/21670811.2021.196997411:9(1577-1596)Online publication date: 2-Sep-2021
  • (2021)How is science clicked on Twitter? Click metrics for Bitly short links to scientific publicationsJournal of the Association for Information Science and Technology10.1002/asi.24458Online publication date: 23-Jan-2021

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cover image ACM Conferences
ASONAM '19: Proceedings of the 2019 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining
August 2019
1228 pages
ISBN:9781450368681
DOI:10.1145/3341161
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 15 January 2020

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Author Tags

  1. Bitly
  2. Twitter
  3. news and information sharing
  4. social media
  5. temporal click dynamics

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ASONAM '19 Paper Acceptance Rate 41 of 286 submissions, 14%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 116 of 549 submissions, 21%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2021)The Str(AI)ght Scoop: Artificial Intelligence Cues Reduce Perceptions of Hostile Media BiasDigital Journalism10.1080/21670811.2021.196997411:9(1577-1596)Online publication date: 2-Sep-2021
  • (2021)How is science clicked on Twitter? Click metrics for Bitly short links to scientific publicationsJournal of the Association for Information Science and Technology10.1002/asi.24458Online publication date: 23-Jan-2021

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