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1. Reluctant to Share: How Third Person Perceptions of Fake News Discourage News Readers From Sharing “Real News” on Social Media

   https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120955173  

   Yang, Fan ; Horning, Michael ( July 2020 , Social Media + Society)

   null (Ed.)

   Rampant fake news on social media has drawn significant attention. Yet, much remains unknown as to how such imbalanced evaluations of self versus others could shape social media users’ perceptions and their subsequent attitudes and behavioral intentions regarding social media news. An online survey ( N = 335) was conducted to examine the third person effect (TPE) in fake news on social media and suggested that users perceived a greater influence of fake news on others than on themselves. However, although users evaluated fake news as socially undesirable, they were still unsupportive of government censorship as a remedy. In addition, the perceived prevalence of fake news leads audiences to reported significantly less willingness to share all news on social media either online or offline. 

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2. Digital platforms in the news industry: how social media platforms impact traditional media news viewership

   Ren, Jie ; Dong, Hang ; Popovic, Ales ; Sabnis, Gaurav ; Nickerson, Jeffrey V. ( January 2023 , European Journal of Information Systems)

   We examine how social media plays the role of an attention driver for traditional media. Social media attracts and channels attention to a topic. This attention triggers people to seek further information that is reported professionally in traditional media. Specifically, the volume of social media posts about a stock influences the attention to this stock the next day, proxied by the viewership of news articles on the same stock published the next day. We test this hypothesis in the stock market context because social media is less likely than traditional media to diffuse fundamental information in the stock market. Analysing stock-related news articles and stock-related social media posts from Sina Finance and Sina Weibo, we find that the social media post volume of a stock at time t-1 is associated with the traditional media viewership of the same stock at time t. This effect is amplified when social media sentiment about the stock is more intense or positive, and with an increase in the volume of verified social media posts about the stock. Our results provide evidence that social media platforms act as attention drivers, which differ from the information channel functions discussed in prior literature. 

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3. A Three-dimensional Model of News Recirculation: Towards a Unified Understanding of News Sharing

   https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2022.2150264  

   Barchas-Lichtenstein, Jena ( November 2022 , Journalism Studies)

   This paper responds to calls for theory-building about news sharing on social media, arguing for a unified understanding of sharing practices both online and off. Developing a theoretical understanding of news sharing requires broadening our gaze to include other communicative technologies, such as postal mail, email, voice calls, and in-person conversation. In a conceptual contribution based on reflections about my participation in long-term multi-method collaborative studies in the US, I argue that news sharing is an act of commitment at the core. I also propose a three-dimensional model of news recirculation. The first two dimensions, publicness and ephemerality, are ideological – although they widely misrecognized as properties of specific channels and platforms. People enact a third dimension of practice, voice, when they recirculate news. 

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4. Search as News Curator: The Role of Google in Shaping Attention to News Information

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300683  

   Trielli, Daniel ; Diakopoulos, Nicholas ( May 2019 , Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems)

   This paper presents an algorithm audit of the Google Top Stories box, a prominent component of search engine results and powerful driver of traffic to news publishers. As such, it is important in shaping user attention towards news outlets and topics. By analyzing the number of appearances of news article links we contribute a series of novel analyses that provide an in-depth characterization of news source diversity and its implications for attention via Google search. We present results indicating a considerable degree of source concentration (with variation among search terms), a slight exaggeration in the ideological skew of news in comparison to a baseline, and a quantification of how the presentation of items translates into traffic and attention for publishers. We contribute insights that underscore the power that Google wields in exposing users to diverse news information, and raise important questions and opportunities for future work on algorithmic news curation. 

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5. In News We Trust?: Examining Credibility and Sharing Behaviors of Fake News

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3328529.3328554  

   Stefanone, Michael A. ; Vollmer, Matthew ; Covert, Jessica M. ( January 2019 , The 10th International Conference on Social Media and Society)