Quick Summary:
After conducting the largest study on news producers/consumers on Twitter by crawling millions of tweets from 5,000 Twitter accounts as well as those of over a million news consumers, Bagdouri et al. were able to extract some interesting information about Arab and English news producers and the way they broadcast/interact with their consumers. They utilized Welch and Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests to quantify statistically significant differences in eight comparisons.
Some key points of interest include:
- News organizations tweet more often that journalists, using more hashtags and links
- Journalists seem to interact with their consumers much more often than organizations
- English journalists are more likely to be verified than their Arabic counterparts
- Arab journalists are much more distinguishable from their consumers than English journalists
Reflection:
RThis study was an important step in understanding how news producers’ function is changing in our society. With all the “fake news” going around, it is imperative that we better understand these changes to make sure they are for good, and not for the worse.
Throughout the paper, I found a lot of the results unsurprising (ex: Journalists tweet from their phones more often than news organizations, British and Irish journalists are similar), but there were a few results that peaked my interest.
- Organization post 3x more, share more links, and post more hashtags than journalists. This leads one to believe that news organizations are using Twitter as a medium to GAIN ATTENTION, rather than perhaps focusing on conveying quality information. And, it appears to work; news organizations have a significant amount more followers than journalists.
- Journalists mention almost 2x more and reply much more often to their consumers. They also use more personal language. Clearly, journalists interact more with their consumers… but is this a good thing, or is it concerning? It could be that journalists are furthering an investigation on news, they could be looking to further their personal political agenda by interacting with their consumers, OR they may just be trying to create a closer relationship with their consumers. This would be something I personally would find interesting to further explore: What are the motivations behind journalists responding to their consumers so often?
- English Journalists are more often verified than Arab Journalists. My concern with this statistic is that there could be a myriad of reasons for this. Is Twitter not paying close enough attention to the Arab world to endorse their news sources? Or are they ignoring most non-English speaking countries? Could English journalists be more verified and followed because they reach a greater audience? Is it because more English speakers use Twitter?
- Arab journalists are 22 times more likely to be verified than their consumers. In comparison, English journalists are only 5 times more likely to be verified than their consumers. This indicates that Arab journalists are much more distinguishable from their consumers- but why? It could be that there are more casual users in the Arab world, or maybe that there are less high-profile Arab celebrities in comparison to their journalists. Either way, this is another question I’d like to see further explored.
- Finally, I found it interesting was that almost 3% of English news consumers studied were verified. I was SHOCKED to hear that 1-in-34 news-consuming English twitter users were verified- am I next to get the blue checkmark? Or one of the other 34 people in this class?
After examining this study, I feel much more informed about how to disseminate information from various news sources on Twitter, and hope that a more detailed study is done on some of the specific questions asked in my reflection.
