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

TL;DR

This study analyzes Twitter news sharing in Argentina, revealing that ideological polarization significantly influences community formation and media outlet preferences, with distinct groups aligned with major political parties.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence that political polarization drives the emergence of media communities and user groups in Twitter news sharing behavior in Argentina.

Findings

Communities of news articles are strongly polarized along ideological lines.

Users form two distinct groups based on media outlet preferences.

Media outlets show bias towards Argentina's two main political parties.

Abstract

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 the formation of public opinion. In this work we study news sharing of main Argentinian media outlets in Twitter, using bipartite news-user networks, in order to understand if the emergence of affinity groups is driven by the underlying political polarization. We compare the results between an electoral and non-electoral year and between a set of politically active users and a control group. We found that users' behavior produces well differentiated communities of news articles identified by a unique distribution of media outlets in all analyzed datasets. In particular, these communities split into two groups which reflect the dominant ideological polarization in Argentina. We also found that users form two well differentiated groups identified by their preferences in media outlets consumption. These two groups of media outlets display a bias towards the two main political parties that rule the political life in Argentina. These results reveal consistently that ideological polarization is the main driving force shaping the Argentinian news sharing in Twitter.