News preferences of Twitter users

Twitter users from different countries tend to read different types of news, a recent study by Brazilian scholar Marco Toledo Bastos has shown. Brits and Americans read world news and opinionated pieces, Spaniards prefer local news, while Brazilians favor items on football.


Marco Toledo Bastos

News preferences of Twitter users were the topic of the open lecture by Marco Bastos, postdoc researcher at London School of Economics, that took place in St.Petersburg campus of Higher School of Economics (HSE). Dr.Bastos was invited jointly by the Internet Studies Lab at HSE Petersburg, faculty of media communications at HSE Moscow, and Center for New Media and Society at New Economics School, Moscow. Having analysed several million of tweets with R and Python scripts, Dr. Bastos has found out that twitter users in Germany and Spain prefer local news, while Brits have more interest to international affairs. The research has also shown that social networks let people influence the popularity of news items. From now on readers have become not only text consumers, but also agents in news production determining which news will draw more attention in social networks.


Marco Toledo Bastos

In total, the analysis included 3 million tweets hyperlinking to news that had been published by the largest media in the USA, Great Britain, Spain, Brazil and Germany in the selected two weeks in 2012. The paper is available at Sage Open. Photos from the lecture HERE.

Date

21 October 2013

Topics

Research & Expertise

Keywords

open lectures Reporting an event partnerships

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