There is reason to believe that an increasing proportion of the news consumers receive is not from news producers directly but is recirculated through social network sites and email by ordinary citizens. This may produce some fundamental changes in the information environment, but the data to examine this possibility have thus far been relatively limited. In the current paper, we examine the changing information environment by leveraging a body of data on the frequency of (a) views, and recirculations through (b) Twitter, (c) Facebook, and (d) email of New York Times stories. We expect that the distribution of sentiment (positive-negative) in news stories will shift in a positive direction as we move from (a) to (d), based in large part on the literatures on self-presentation and imagined audiences. Our findings support this expectation and have important implications for the information contexts increasingly shaping public opinion.

中文翻译：

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社交媒体和不断变化的信息环境

有理由相信，越来越多的消费者收到的新闻不是直接来自新闻制作者，而是由普通公民通过社交网站和电子邮件进行再传播。这可能会导致信息环境发生一些根本性的变化，但迄今为止，用于检验这种可能性的数据相对有限。在当前的论文中，我们通过利用关于 (a) 观看频率和通过 (b) Twitter、(c) Facebook 和 (d) 纽约时报故事的电子邮件进行再循环的大量数据来研究不断变化的信息环境。我们预计，随着我们从 (a) 移到 (d)，新闻故事中的情绪分布（正负）将朝着积极的方向转变，这在很大程度上基于关于自我呈现和想象受众的文献。