News Company's Link Sharing on Twitter as Informative Advertising and Content Signaling

As social media becomes one of the major sources of news, news companies are using it to advertise their individual news articles. This increases news companies' need to consider social media users' limited attention when they compete with a variety of contents generated by the users as well as news stories shared by other news companies. This work explores the implications of media companies' competition for limited attention from users on social media for news diversity. Using an economic model, I suggest a hypothesis that news companies are likely to share news articles with non-controversial topics to signal for their unshared news. To examine this hypothesis, I am analyzing sentiments of news articles that are shared and unshared on Twitter.