Sharing News Articles Using 140 Characters: A Diffusion Analysis on Twitter

Is it possible to effectively spread news articles to a large audience using 140 characters? How does the microblogging website Twitter get used as a platform for the news media agencies to create awareness about the articles they publish on a daily basis? Our study of the diffusion patterns of news articles from 12 popular news sources, including BBC, New York Times, and Mash able on Twitter reveals that a large number of users not only consume and comment on these news articles but also share them in different ways. Combining the methods of network and temporal analyses, we examine and report on how news articles diffuse on Twitter, and how different propagation mechanisms result in different life spans for news articles.