Abstract

While news sharing by ordinary social media users has received growing attention, hyper-partisan news sharing, which has been closely associated with misinformation circulation, has received less attention. In this study, we investigate hyper-partisan news sharing from two perspectives: (1) the features that make hyper-partisan news share-worthy, as well as (2) the user motivations that drive the sharing process. We scrutinize one week’s content from Infowars.com as it was shared on Twitter. Through both manual coding of news content and semi-automated clustering of Twitter account descriptions, we find that human interest and conflict in news stories drive the sharing process from a content perspective. Concerning the user perspective, we find partial support for a sharing hypothesis based on motivated reasoning, which indicates that users are more likely to share hyper-partisan news stories if these align with their own political opinions.

摘要

虽然普通社交媒体用户的新闻分享受到越来越多的关注，但与错误信息传播密切相关的超党派新闻分享受到的关注较少。在这项研究中，我们从两个角度调查了超党派新闻共享：（1）使超党派新闻值得分享的特征，以及（2）推动共享过程的用户动机。我们仔细检查了来自Infowars.com 的一周内容因为它是在 Twitter 上分享的。通过新闻内容的手动编码和 Twitter 帐户描述的半自动聚类，我们发现新闻故事中的人类利益和冲突从内容的角度推动了共享过程。关于用户的观点，我们发现部分支持基于动机推理的共享假设，这表明如果用户与他们自己的政治观点一致，则更有可能分享超党派新闻故事。