Networks of Audience Overlap in the Consumption of Digital News
Networks of Audience Overlap in the Consumption of Digital News
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DOI：
10.1093/joc/jqx007
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发表时间：
2018-02-01
影响因子：
7.9
通讯作者：
Gonzalez-Bailon, Sandra
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Mukerjee, Subhayan;Majo-Vazquez, Silvia;Gonzalez-Bailon, Sandra
人们是如何在网上消费新闻的？在这里，我们提出了一种新的方法来回答这个问题，使用网络用户的浏览行为和他们在浏览新闻内容时形成的网络。在这些网络中，如果两家新闻媒体的受众有一小部分相同，它们就会联系在一起。我们建议对先前研究中采用的方法进行两项关键改进：通过统计检验过滤掉站点之间的非显著重叠；并采用阈值法来确定受众网络的核心。我们使用两个数据集来解释为什么我们的方法比以前的方法更好：一个数据集跟踪2016年英国脱欧公投期间的数字新闻消费，另一个数据集跟踪2016年美国总统大选期间的数字新闻消费。我们表明，我们的过滤技术产生了一个完全不同的顶级网站排名，揭示了受众网络的结构特性，否则这些特性将被忽视。
How do people consume news online? Here, we propose a novel way to answer this question using the browsing behavior of web users and the networks they form while navigating news content. In these networks, two news outlets are connected if they share a fraction of their audiences. We propose two crucial improvements to the methodology employed in previous research: a statistical test to filter out non-significant overlap between sites; and a thresholding approach to identify the core of the audience network. We explain why our approach is better than previous approaches using two data sets: one tracks digital news consumption during the 2016 Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom and the other during the 2016 Presidential Election in the United States. We show that our filtering technique produces a completely different ranking of top sites, uncovering structural properties in the audience network that would go unnoticed otherwise.