With the widespread adoption of social media sites like Twitter and Facebook,
there has been a shift in the way information is produced and consumed.
Earlier, the only producers of information were traditional news organizations,
which broadcast the same carefully-edited information to all consumers over
mass media channels. Whereas, now, in online social media, any user can be a
producer of information, and every user selects which other users she connects
to, thereby choosing the information she consumes. Moreover, the personalized
recommendations that most social media sites provide also contribute towards
the information consumed by individual users. In this work, we define a concept
of information diet -- which is the topical distribution of a given set of
information items (e.g., tweets) -- to characterize the information produced
and consumed by various types of users in the popular Twitter social media. At
a high level, we find that (i) popular users mostly produce very specialized
diets focusing on only a few topics; in fact, news organizations (e.g.,
NYTimes) produce much more focused diets on social media as compared to their
mass media diets, (ii) most users' consumption diets are primarily focused
towards one or two topics of their interest, and (iii) the personalized
recommendations provided by Twitter help to mitigate some of the topical
imbalances in the users' consumption diets, by adding information on diverse
topics apart from the users' primary topics of interest.Comment: In Proceeding of International AAAI Conference on Web and Social
Media (ICWSM), Oxford, UK, May 201
