Making retweeting social: The influence of content and context information on sharing news in Twitter

Two studies investigate criteria of content and context on sharing news in Twitter.Both informational value and agent awareness influence the retweeting of news.The influence of awareness is mediated by the perceived importance of the news.Influences are moderated by the reference to a salient in-group. Spreading news in Web 2.0 is easy and ubiquitous, especially in Twitter via retweeting. However, while some news develops viral power, other remains disregarded. The paper presents two laboratory experiments about potentially influencing criteria on retweeting. Study 1 investigated whether content criteria (informational value) and context criteria (agent awareness) influence retweeting decisions. It was hypothesized that agent awareness would moderate the influence of informational value on retweeting. Results did not confirm the hypothesis but instead revealed that both high informational value and agent awareness information led to retweeting. Further, the influence of both informational value and agent awareness on retweeting was mediated by the perceived importance of the tweets. Study 2 investigated the influence of the informational value of the news, agent awareness, and in-group reference. It was hypothesized that the influence of informational value and of agent awareness on retweeting are moderated by in-group reference. The results confirmed these assumptions and showed that informational value had more influence if agents did not belong to a salient in-group compared to if they did. In contrast, agent awareness had more influence if agents belonged to a salient in-group compared to if they did not.

[1]  T. Postmes,et al.  The Formation of Group Norms in Computer-Mediated Communication , 2000 .

[2]  Piet Schenelaars.  Public opinion , 1994, Bio/Technology.

[3]  D. Dolinski,et al.  Social Influence , 2007 .

[4]  T. Harcup,et al.  What Is News? Galtung and Ruge revisited , 2001 .

[5]  W. Wirth,et al.  Die Nachrichtenwertforschung auf dem Weg zum Publikum , 1999 .

[6]  Katherine L. Milkman,et al.  What Makes Online Content Viral? , 2012 .

[7]  R. Cialdini,et al.  Social influence: Social norms, conformity and compliance. , 1998 .

[8]  Timothy W. Finin,et al.  Why we twitter: understanding microblogging usage and communities , 2007, WebKDD/SNA-KDD '07.

[9]  Christiane Eilders.  News factors and news decisions. Theoretical and methodological advances in Germany , 2006 .

[10]  Anja Rudat,et al.  Twitter Breaks the News: Influencing Factors on Sharing News in Twitter , 2014 .

[11]  Maria de Fatima Oliveira,et al.  Affective News and Networked Publics: The Rhythms of News Storytelling on #Egypt , 2012 .

[12]  Keith James,et al.  In-Group Salience, Intergroup Comparison, and Individual Performance and Self-Esteem , 1989 .

[13]  R. Nadeau,et al.  New Evidence About the Existence of a Bandwagon Effect in the Opinion Formation Process , 1993 .

[14]  T. Postmes,et al.  Social Influence in Computer-Mediated Communication: The Effects of Anonymity on Group Behavior , 2001 .

[15]  Pamela J. Shoemaker.  News and newsworthiness: A commentary , 2006 .

[16]  Mary Beth Rosson,et al.  Notification and awareness: synchronizing task-oriented collaborative activity , 2003, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..

[17]  Tim O'Reilly,et al.  What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software , 2007 .

[18]  S. Shyam Sundar,et al.  Authority vs. peer: how interface cues influence users , 2009, CHI Extended Abstracts.

[19]  Rosanna E. Guadagno,et al.  Strategic Uses of Social Technology: An Interactive Perspective of Social Psychology , 2012, Int. J. Interact. Commun. Syst. Technol..

[20]  H. H. Clark,et al.  Audience Design in Meaning and Reference , 1982 .

[21]  Tanja Engelmann,et al.  Knowledge and information awareness for initiating transactive memory system processes of computer-supported collaborating ad hoc groups , 2010, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[22]  Jürgen Buder,et al.  Group awareness tools for learning: Current and future directions , 2011, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[23]  Clifford Nass,et al.  Experimental Tests of Normative Group Influence and Representation Effects in Computer-Mediated Communication: When Interacting Via Computers Differs from Interacting With Computers. , 2002 .

[24]  S. Chaiken,et al.  Audience response as a heuristic cue in persuasion. , 1987, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[25]  Jürgen Buder,et al.  Reducing confirmation bias and evaluation bias: When are preference-inconsistent recommendations effective - and when not? , 2012, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[26]  Joachim Friedrich Staab.  The Role of News Factors in News Selection: A Theoretical Reconsideration , 1990 .

[27]  Kai Sassenberg,et al.  Strategic Uses of Social Technology: An interactional approach to social influence in computer-mediated communication , 2011 .

[28]  Peter Paolucci,et al.  Designing Information Spaces: The Social Navigation Approach , 2003, J. Educ. Technol. Soc..

[29]  Karl Erik Rosengren,et al.  International News: Methods, Data and Theory , 1974 .

[30]  Danah Boyd,et al.  Tweet, Tweet, Retweet: Conversational Aspects of Retweeting on Twitter , 2010, 2010 43rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

[31]  Brandon Van Der Heide,et al.  A social network as information: The effect of system generated reports of connectedness on credibility on Twitter , 2012, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[32]  Daniel Bodemer,et al.  Supporting controversial CSCL discussions with augmented group awareness tools , 2007, Int. J. Comput. Support. Collab. Learn..

[33]  W. Wayne Fu,et al.  Selecting Online Videos from Graphics, Text, and View Counts: The Moderation of Popularity Bandwagons , 2012, J. Comput. Mediat. Commun..

[34]  Paul Dourish,et al.  Running Out of Space: Models of Information Navigation , 1999 .

[35]  N. Krämer,et al.  Information Selection in the Blogosphere: The Effect of Expertise, Community Rating, and Age , 2010 .

[36]  Lars Kai Hansen,et al.  Good Friends, Bad News - Affect and Virality in Twitter , 2011, ArXiv.

[37]  Friedrich W. Hesse,et al.  Audience design in Twitter: Retweeting behavior between informational value and followers' interests , 2014, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[38]  Qian Xu,et al.  The bandwagon effect of collaborative filtering technology , 2008, CHI Extended Abstracts.

[39]  J. Galtung,et al.  The Structure of Foreign News , 1965 .

[40]  A. Hermida.  From TV to Twitter: How Ambient News Became Ambient Journalism , 2010 .

[41]  Helen Partridge,et al.  Towards tacit knowledge sharing over social web tools , 2013, J. Knowl. Manag..

[42]  D. A. Kenny,et al.  Estimating and testing mediation and moderation in within-subject designs. , 2001, Psychological methods.

[43]  Hosung Park,et al.  What is Twitter, a social network or a news media? , 2010, WWW '10.

[44]  Ed H. Chi,et al.  Want to be Retweeted? Large Scale Analytics on Factors Impacting Retweet in Twitter Network , 2010, 2010 IEEE Second International Conference on Social Computing.

[45]  Jeroen Janssen,et al.  Group awareness tools: It's what you do with it that matters , 2011, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[46]  Gijsbert Erkens,et al.  Group awareness of social and cognitive performance in a CSCL environment: Effects of a peer feedback and reflection tool , 2011, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[47]  Daniel Bodemer,et al.  Knowledge awareness in CSCL: A psychological perspective , 2009, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[48]  Raleigh North.  Haewoon, Kwak, Changhyun, Lee, Park, Hosung, and Moon, Sue. . What is Twitter, a Social Network or a News Media?. 19th International World Wide Web (WWW) Conference.April. , 2010 .

[49]  Jürgen Buder,et al.  Learning with personalized recommender systems: A psychological view , 2012, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[50]  S. Fiske,et al.  The Handbook of Social Psychology , 1935 .

[51]  R. Spears,et al.  Social influence and the influence of the 'social' in computer-mediated communication. , 1992 .

[52]  Noah J. Goldstein,et al.  Social influence: compliance and conformity. , 2004, Annual review of psychology.

[53]  Georg von Krogh,et al.  "What's coming next?" Epistemic curiosity and lurking behavior in online communities , 2013, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[54]  Patrick Rössler,et al.  Selection and impact of press photography. An empirical study on the basis of photo news factors , 2011 .

[55]  Chei Sian Lee,et al.  News sharing in social media: The effect of gratifications and prior experience , 2012, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[56]  J. Janssen,et al.  Coordinated Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning: Awareness and Awareness Tools , 2013 .

[57]  Daniel M. Oppenheimer,et al.  Heuristics made easy: an effort-reduction framework. , 2008, Psychological bulletin.

[58]  S. Shyam Sundar,et al.  Can online buddies and bandwagon cues enhance user participation in online health communities? , 2014, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[59]  Øystein Sande,et al.  The Perception of Foreign News , 1971 .

[60]  Rizal Setya Perdana.  What is Twitter , 2013 .