Article:

Social infomediation of news on Twitter – A French case study

Social infomediation is an emerging phenomenon that sees growing numbers of Internet users share and comment on news items on Facebook and Twitter. This study analyses a large sample of French-speaking Twitter users over a period of two months. First, we study some general characteristics of our sample’s usage of Twitter, such as timescale, productivity, hashtag, and URL distribution. We then compare the French online media agenda to the most shared and discussed news items in our sample in order to highlight similarities and differences. Our findings show that even though they depend on mainstream media coverage, Twitter user preferences often push political and technological stories that have been overlooked or even ignored to the forefront.