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

CICCHINI, TOMAS; DEL POZO, SOFIA MORENA; TAGLIAZUCCHI, ENZO; BALENZUELA, PABLO

EPJ Data Science

Springer Nature

Año: 2022 vol. 11

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 theformation of public opinion. In this work, we used bipartite news-user networks tostudy the news sharing behavior of main Argentinian media outlets in Twitter. Ourobjective was to understand the role of political polarization in the emergence ofhigh affinity groups with respect to news sharing. We compared results betweenyears with and without presidential elections, and between groups of politicallyactive and inactive users, the latter serving as a control group. The behavior of usersresulted in well-differentiated communities of news articles identified by a uniquedistribution of media outlets. In particular, the structure of these communitiesrevealed the dominant ideological polarization in Argentina. We also found that usersformed two groups identified by their consumption of media outlets, which alsodisplayed a bias towards the two main parties that dominate the political life inArgentina. Overall, our results consistently identified ideological polarization as a maindriving force underlying Argentinian news sharing behavior in Twitter