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Temporal Dynamics of User Engagement with U.S. News Sources on Facebook
Linköping University, Department of Computer and Information Science, Database and information techniques. Linköping University, Faculty of Science & Engineering.
Linköping University, Department of Computer and Information Science, Database and information techniques. Linköping University, Faculty of Science & Engineering.ORCID iD: 0000-0003-1367-1594
2022 (English)In: Proc. International Conference on Social Networks Analysis, Management and Security (SNAMS), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 2022Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

Recently, researchers have modeled how reliability and political bias of news may affect Facebook users' engagement, as measured using interaction metrics such as the number of shares, likes, etc. However, the temporal dynamics of Facebook users' engagement with news of varying degrees of bias and reliability is less studied. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is also important to quantify how the pandemic changed user engagement with various news. This paper presents the first temporal study of Facebook users' interaction dynamics, accounting for both the bias and reliability of the publishers. We consider a dataset of 992 U.S. publishers, and the study spans the period from Jan. 2018 to July 2022. This allows us to accurately assess the effect of the covid outbreak on the temporal dynamics of Facebook users' interactions with different classes of news. Our study examines these two parameters' effect on Facebook user engagement using both per-publisher and aggregated statistics. Several findings are revealed by our analysis, including that publishers in different bias and reliability classes experienced significantly different levels of engagement dynamics during and following the covid outbreak. For example, we show that the least reliable news exhibited the most considerable growth of followers during the covid period and the most reliable news sources exhibited the greatest growth rate of followers during the post-covid period. We also show that the interaction rate (number of interactions normalized over the number of followers) with Facebook news posts during the post-covid period is smaller than it was even before the outbreak. Furthermore, we demonstrate how the COVID-19 outbreak caused statistically significant structural breaks in the temporal dynamics of engagement with several types of news, and quantify this effect. With social media becoming a popular news source during crises, the observed temporal dynamics provide important insights into how information was consumed over the recent years, benefiting both researchers and public sectors.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 2022.
Series
2022 Ninth International Conference on Social Networks Analysis, Management and Security (SNAMS), ISSN 2831-7351, E-ISSN 2831-7343
National Category
Computer Sciences
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-199089DOI: 10.1109/SNAMS58071.2022.10062675Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85158985063ISBN: 9798350320480 (electronic)ISBN: 9798350320497 (print)OAI: oai:DiVA.org:liu-199089DiVA, id: diva2:1811233
Conference
Proc. International Conference on Social Networks Analysis, Management and Security (SNAMS), Milan, Italy, 29 November 2022 - 01 December, 2022
Available from: 2023-11-11 Created: 2023-11-11 Last updated: 2023-11-16Bibliographically approved

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Mohammadinodooshan, AlirezaCarlsson, Niklas

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Citation style
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