News Sharing in Social Media: A Review of Current Research on News Sharing Users, Content, and Networks

Kümpel, Anna Sophie; Karnowski, Veronika; Keyling, Till

doi:10.1177/2056305115610141

Cited by 332 publications

(272 citation statements)

References 80 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

240

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Several important studies have focused on people’s social media reactions to emerging health care crises such as disease outbreaks, where news stories often drive participation [35,36]. The role of narrative on social media sites as a persuasive rhetorical strategy in regard to health care decision making has also been explored, although this important work is largely preliminary [3,13,22,37].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Mommy Blogs” and the Vaccination Exemption Narrative: Results From A Machine-Learning Approach for Story Aggregation on Parenting Social Media Sites

Tangherlini¹,

Roychowdhury²,

Glenn³

et al. 2016

JMIR Public Health Surveill

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

BackgroundSocial media offer an unprecedented opportunity to explore how people talk about health care at a very large scale. Numerous studies have shown the importance of websites with user forums for people seeking information related to health. Parents turn to some of these sites, colloquially referred to as “mommy blogs,” to share concerns about children’s health care, including vaccination. Although substantial work has considered the role of social media, particularly Twitter, in discussions of vaccination and other health care–related issues, there has been little work on describing the underlying structure of these discussions and the role of persuasive storytelling, particularly on sites with no limits on post length. Understanding the role of persuasive storytelling at Internet scale provides useful insight into how people discuss vaccinations, including exemption-seeking behavior, which has been tied to a recent diminution of herd immunity in some communities.ObjectiveTo develop an automated and scalable machine-learning method for story aggregation on social media sites dedicated to discussions of parenting. We wanted to discover the aggregate narrative frameworks to which individuals, through their exchange of experiences and commentary, contribute over time in a particular topic domain. We also wanted to characterize temporal trends in these narrative frameworks on the sites over the study period.MethodsTo ensure that our data capture long-term discussions and not short-term reactions to recent events, we developed a dataset of 1.99 million posts contributed by 40,056 users and viewed 20.12 million times indexed from 2 parenting sites over a period of 105 months. Using probabilistic methods, we determined the topics of discussion on these parenting sites. We developed a generative statistical-mechanical narrative model to automatically extract the underlying stories and story fragments from millions of posts. We aggregated the stories into an overarching narrative framework graph. In our model, stories were represented as network graphs with actants as nodes and their various relationships as edges. We estimated the latent stories circulating on these sites by modeling the posts as a sampling of the hidden narrative framework graph. Temporal trends were examined based on monthly user-poststatistics.ResultsWe discovered that discussions of exemption from vaccination requirements are highly represented. We found a strong narrative framework related to exemption seeking and a culture of distrust of government and medical institutions. Various posts reinforced part of the narrative framework graph in which parents, medical professionals, and religious institutions emerged as key nodes, and exemption seeking emerged as an important edge. In the aggregate story, parents used religion or belief to acquire exemptions to protect their children from vaccines that are required by schools or government institutions, but (allegedly) cause adverse reactions such as autism, pain, compromised immunity, and even dea...

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Mommy Blogs” and the Vaccination Exemption Narrative: Results From A Machine-Learning Approach for Story Aggregation on Parenting Social Media Sites

Tangherlini¹,

Roychowdhury²,

Glenn³

et al. 2016

JMIR Public Health Surveill

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The latter focuses on users' ways of engaging in this process in terms of motivations and social connectedness. Most studies looking at sharing activities from a user perspective so far adopt a Uses and Gratifications or Diffusion of Innovation perspective to the matter (Kümpel, Karnowski, & Keyling, 2015). In their overview article of news sharing studies from 2004 to 2014, Kümpel et al (2015, p. 6) identify three basic categories of motivations to share news: self-serving motives (gaining reputation and status among peers and other users), altruistic motives (inform others), and social motives (interact with others and get social approval).…”

Section: Exploring Factors For Engaging In News Sharing and Commentingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Who Shares and Comments on News?: A Cross-National Comparative Analysis of Online and Social Media Participation

Kalogeropoulos¹,

Negredo

Picone³

et al. 2017

Social Media + Society

126

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In this article, we present a cross-national comparative analysis of which online news users in practice engage with the participatory potential for sharing and commenting on news afforded by interactive features in news websites and social media technologies across a strategic sample of six different countries. Based on data from the 2016 Reuters Institute Digital News Report, and controlling for a range of factors, we find that (1) people who use social media for news and a high number of different social media platforms are more likely to also engage more actively with news outside social media by commenting on news sites and sharing news via email, (2) political partisans on both sides are more likely to engage in sharing and commenting particularly on news stories in social media, and (3) people with high interest in hard news are more likely to comment on news on both news sites and social media and share stores via social media (and people with high interest in any kind of news [hard or soft] are more likely to share stories via email). Our analysis suggests that the online environment reinforces some long-standing inequalities in participation while countering other long-standing inequalities. The findings indicate a self-reinforcing positive spiral where the already motivated are more likely in practice to engage with the potential for participation offered by digital media, and a negative spiral where those who are less engaged participate less.

show abstract

“…One of the most important affordances social media offer is the ability to easily share political information with others in one's social network. Rather than being passive consumers of news, social media allow citizens to easily post, recommend, and distribute news and political content to others in their online social networks (Kümpel, Karnowski, & Keyling, ; Weeks & Holbert, ). Thus, sharing in social media has become a central component of contemporary news engagement, and has a number of consequences for the political environment, ranging from the potential to increase feelings of involvement with news (Oeldorf‐Hirsch & Sundar, ), to diffusing news beyond its original audience (Ju, Jeong, & Chyi, ) and affecting news interpretation through social cues (Turcotte, York, Irving, Scholl, & Pingree, ).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Incidental Exposure, Selective Exposure, and Political Information Sharing: Integrating Online Exposure Patterns and Expression on Social Media

Weeks

Lane

Kim

et al. 2017

Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication

201

108

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Political information sharing in social media offers citizens opportunities to engage with news and express their political views, but how do different patterns of online political information exposure, including both incidental and selective exposure, affect sharing? Using two‐wave panel survey data collected in the United States, we examine the relationship between incidental and selective exposure and their consequent links to political information sharing, across different levels of strength of political party affiliation. Our results demonstrate that incidental exposure to counter‐attitudinal information drives stronger partisans to more actively seek out like‐minded political content, which subsequently encourages political information sharing on social media. The results highlight the need to consider both types of political information exposure when modeling citizens' political behavior online.

show abstract

News Sharing in Social Media: A Review of Current Research on News Sharing Users, Content, and Networks

Cited by 332 publications

References 80 publications

“Mommy Blogs” and the Vaccination Exemption Narrative: Results From A Machine-Learning Approach for Story Aggregation on Parenting Social Media Sites

“Mommy Blogs” and the Vaccination Exemption Narrative: Results From A Machine-Learning Approach for Story Aggregation on Parenting Social Media Sites

Who Shares and Comments on News?: A Cross-National Comparative Analysis of Online and Social Media Participation

Incidental Exposure, Selective Exposure, and Political Information Sharing: Integrating Online Exposure Patterns and Expression on Social Media

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About