Algorithm reveals how Twitter hurts the quality of news

In general, social media is influential, but it has less power than it might think. A new study shows that the production and editorial decisions of publishers are affected by the use of social media.

The Center for Economic and Policy Research is a think tank that specializes in economic policy. Authors Julia Cagé, Nicolas Hervé, and Béatrice Mazoyer detail in their findings the increasing influence of social media as a source of news.

Research shows that it is an important news source for journalists. The value of a news source increases when there is a lot of journalists using it.

The "joint events" are news stories that are covered by both social media and traditional media. Researchers looked at documents to see if they talked about the Hokkaido earthquake. The documents that would be looked for were similar to each other. The researchers found that 97 percent of the events started on the social networking site. They found that more articles are written about an event when there is a social media buzz around it.

The researchers looked at how the business models of media outlets factor into what type of content is produced. They found that sites with online content locked behind a paywall have a lower influence on outlets that rely on advertising revenue. Soft paywall media outlets were more likely to cover stories from the internet than metered or hard paywall outlets.

Short-term considerations generated by advertising revenue-bearing clicks are what influence mainstream media.

The authors think that the quality of news is getting worse for people who can't afford it or aren't interested in buying it. The researchers suggest that this is due to the fact that media outlets that are more influenced by the popularity of content on social media don't have paywalls.

According to the researchers, bias in what media outlets think readers want to see may be created by the use of the social networking site. The app is not representative of the general news reading population according to a study. Looking at audience data, the researchers concluded that news articles that are more popular on social media do not get more views compared to the other articles.