News sharing on Twitter reveals emergent fragmentation of media agenda and persistent polarization

News sharing on social networks reveals how information disseminates among users. This process, constrained by user preferences and social ties, plays a key role in the formation of public opinion. In this work, we used bipartite news-user networks to study the news sharing behavior of main Argentinian media outlets in Twitter. Our objective was to understand the role of political polarization in the emergence of high affinity groups with respect to news sharing. We compared results between years with and without presidential elections, and between groups of politically active and inactive users, the latter serving as a control group. The behavior of users resulted in well-differentiated communities of news articles identified by a unique distribution of media outlets. In particular, the structure of these communities revealed the dominant ideological polarization in Argentina. We also found that users formed two groups identified by their consumption of media outlets, which also displayed a bias towards the two main parties that dominate the political life in Argentina. Overall, our results consistently identified ideological polarization as a main driving force underlying Argentinian news sharing behavior in Twitter.Fil: Cicchini, Tomás. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Departamento de Física; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Calculo. - Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Calculo; ArgentinaFil: del Pozo, Sofia Morena. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Departamento de Física; ArgentinaFil: Tagliazucchi, Enzo Rodolfo. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Departamento de Física; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires; ArgentinaFil: Balenzuela, Pablo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Departamento de Física; Argentin

The hidden dimension of information diffusion: A latent space representation of Social Media News Sharing behavior

In times marked by an abundance of news sources and the widespread use of social media for staying informed, acquiring accurate data faces increasing challenges. Today, access to information plays a crucial role in shaping public opinion and is significantly influenced by interactions on social media. Therefore, studying the dissemination of news on these platforms is vital for understanding how individuals stay informed. In this paper, we study emergent properties of media outlet sharing behavior by users in social media. We quantify this behavior in terms of coordinates in a latent space proposing a metric called Media Sharing Index (MSI). We observe that the MSI shows a bimodal distribution in this latent dimension, reflecting the preference of large groups of users for specific groups of media outlets. This methodology allows the study of the extent to which communities of interacting users are permeable to different sources of information. Additionally, it facilitates the analysis of the relationship between users' media outlet preferences, their political leanings, and the political leanings of the media outlets