Quantifying the Economic and Cultural Biases of Social Media through Trending Topics.

ABSTRACT: Online social media has recently irrupted as the last major venue for the propagation of news and cultural content, competing with traditional mass media and allowing citizens to access new sources of information. In this paper, we study collectively filtered news and popular content in Twitter, known as Trending Topics (TTs), to quantify the extent to which they show similar biases known for mass media. We use two datasets collected in 2013 and 2014, including more than 300.000 TTs from 62 countries. The existing patterns of leader-follower relationships among countries reveal systemic biases known for mass media: Countries concentrate their attention to small groups of other countries, generating a pattern of centralization in which TTs follow the gradient of wealth across countries. At

SUBMITTER: Carrascosa JM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4521871 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature