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30-S: Ecuadorian media’s news dissemination through online social networks

Abstract:

The presence of Internet and mobile communication devices are revolutionizing the dissemination of information. The appearance of online social networks is generating fully connected information networks with high availability, which are questioning the traditional models of information dissemination. From the field of mass media, the emergence of Internet, and especially of online social networks, generates a new environment for dissemination of news that is far from the traditional unidirectional environment of mass media. In this work, our interest is focused on developing an empirical analysis of the flow of information disseminated by mass media in online social networks. Specifically, we studied the dissemination of tweets from two Ecuadorian newspapers (one public and one private), with a large circulation and national coverage, during the events of police insubordination of September 30, 2010. Our results show that the network caused by information flow disseminates both newspapers and their followers were multi-stage and multi- directional. This agrees more with a “swarming” model than with the “two-step flow” model, widely used in the literature.