TY - GEN
T1 - Breaking news and younger twitter users
T2 - 10th International Conference on Social Media and Society: Rethinking Privacy and Trust, SMSociety 2019
AU - Joseph, Kenneth
AU - Wihbey, John
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 ACM.
PY - 2019/7/19
Y1 - 2019/7/19
N2 - Breaking news represents an important avenue of information about current events, including life-or-death information during natural disasters, but it can also serve as a vector along which misinformation can rapidly spread. In the present work we study factors associated with the sharing of breaking news by young, college-aged students. Using a unique combination of survey and behavioral data, we identify traits associated with a propensity to share breaking news on Twitter.We find that individuals who share more breaking news report high levels of confidence in their ability to differentiate real from fake news and to manage information overload. However, breaking news sharing is not associated with the reported use of traditional fact-checking strategies (e.g., finding other sources for the same information) before sharing. Thus, our data are consistent with the idea that breaking news sharers tend to rely, at least in part, on confidence in their own understanding of the news when determining what breaking news to share. We contextualize these findings by studying patterns of general news sharing and non-news sharing, as well as studying connections between party affiliation and factors associated with the sharing of content.
AB - Breaking news represents an important avenue of information about current events, including life-or-death information during natural disasters, but it can also serve as a vector along which misinformation can rapidly spread. In the present work we study factors associated with the sharing of breaking news by young, college-aged students. Using a unique combination of survey and behavioral data, we identify traits associated with a propensity to share breaking news on Twitter.We find that individuals who share more breaking news report high levels of confidence in their ability to differentiate real from fake news and to manage information overload. However, breaking news sharing is not associated with the reported use of traditional fact-checking strategies (e.g., finding other sources for the same information) before sharing. Thus, our data are consistent with the idea that breaking news sharers tend to rely, at least in part, on confidence in their own understanding of the news when determining what breaking news to share. We contextualize these findings by studying patterns of general news sharing and non-news sharing, as well as studying connections between party affiliation and factors associated with the sharing of content.
KW - Breaking news
KW - Computational social science
KW - Journalism
KW - Students
KW - Twitter
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85074514037
U2 - 10.1145/3328529.3328548
DO - 10.1145/3328529.3328548
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85074514037
T3 - ACM International Conference Proceeding Series
SP - 83
EP - 91
BT - 10th International Conference on Social Media and Society
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
Y2 - 19 July 2019 through 21 July 2019
ER -