Different News for Different Views: Political News-sharing Communities on Social Media Through the UK General Election in 2015

Media exposure is a central concept in understanding
the dynamics of public opinion and political change. Traditional
models of media exposure have been severely
challenged by the shift to online news consumption and
news-sharing on social media. Here we use network
analysis and automated content analysis to examine
the interaction between news media and social media
around the UK General Election in 2015. We study a
large corpus of UK newspaper articles and Twitter content,
finding significant temporal correlations between
newspaper topic coverage and the content discussed
on Twitter. We also identify news-sharing communities
around groups of news sources that are ideologically
clustered. Analysis of topics covered within each group
shows that different communities are exposed to different
news content during the election. Our results confirm
that ideological bias and selective news-sharing affect
patterns of online media exposure in social media.