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.
There have also been some prior works on whether social media users are receiving multiple perspectives on a specific event or topic @cite_24 @cite_16 @cite_18 @cite_7 @cite_10 . Though we focus only on the topical composition of the information produced and consumed by social media users, the concept of information diet introduced in this work can be extended to study opinion polarization on social media.
@cite_18 @cite_7 @cite_24 @cite_16 @cite_10
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The bias in the news media is an inherent flaw of the news production process. The resulting bias often causes a sharp increase in political polarization and in the cost of conflict on social issues such as Iraq war. It is very difficult, if not impossible, for readers to have penetrating views on realities against such bias. This paper presents NewsCube, a novel Internet news service aiming at mitigating the effect of media bias. NewsCube automatically creates and promptly provides readers with multiple classified viewpoints on a news event of interest. As such, it effectively helps readers understand a fact from a plural of viewpoints and formulate their own, more balanced viewpoints. While media bias problem has been studied extensively in communications and social sciences, our work is the first to develop a news service as a solution and study its effect. We discuss the effect of the service through various user studies. In this paper, we study the linking patterns and discussion topics of political bloggers. Our aim is to measure the degree of interaction between liberal and conservative blogs, and to uncover any differences in the structure of the two communities. Specifically, we analyze the posts of 40 "A-list" blogs over the period of two months preceding the U.S. Presidential Election of 2004, to study how often they referred to one another and to quantify the overlap in the topics they discussed, both within the liberal and conservative communities, and also across communities. We also study a single day snapshot of over 1,000 political blogs. This snapshot captures blogrolls (the list of links to other blogs frequently found in sidebars), and presents a more static picture of a broader blogosphere. Most significantly, we find differences in the behavior of liberal and conservative blogs, with conservative blogs linking to each other more frequently and in a denser pattern. Political discourse in the United States is getting increasingly polarized. This polarization frequently causes different communities to react very differently to the same news events. Political blogs as a form of social media provide an unique insight into this phenomenon. We present a multitarget, semisupervised latent variable model, MCR-LDA to model this process by analyzing political blogs posts and their comment sections from different political communities jointly to predict the degree of polarization that news topics cause. Inspecting the model after inference reveals topics and the degree to which it triggers polarization. In this approach, community responses to news topics are observed using sentiment polarity and comment volume which serves as a proxy for the level of interest in the topic. In this context, we also present computational methods to assign sentiment polarity to the comments which serve as targets for latent variable models that predict the polarity based on the topics in the blog content. Our results show that the joint modeling of communities with different political beliefs using MCR-LDA does not sacrifice accuracy in sentiment polarity prediction when compared to approaches that are tailored to specific communities and additionally provides a view of the polarization in responses from the different communities. In this study we investigate how social media shape the networked public sphere and facilitate communication between communities with different political orientations. We examine two networks of political communication on Twitter, comprised of more than 250,000 tweets from the six weeks leading up to the 2010 U.S. congressional midterm elections. Using a combination of network clustering algorithms and manually-annotated data we demonstrate that the network of political retweets exhibits a highly segregated partisan structure, with extremely limited connectivity between left- and right-leaning users. Surprisingly this is not the case for the user-to-user mention network, which is dominated by a single politically heterogeneous cluster of users in which ideologically-opposed individuals interact at a much higher rate compared to the network of retweets. To explain the distinct topologies of the retweet and mention networks we conjecture that politically motivated individuals provoke interaction by injecting partisan content into information streams whose primary audience consists of ideologically-opposed users. We conclude with statistical evidence in support of this hypothesis.