Examples of Retweets

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Social Media: Is It the "New" News?

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, MySpace-- social media platforms come at us from every angle. On the surface, these sites allow for public display of personal lives, an aspect often criticized by society. However, if you dig a little deeper, you will find that we are in a current social media revolution. This instant communication is becoming a platform for personal, as well as societal, news. Participants are retrieving information quicker than ever before, and spreading it just as fast. Once information hits social media, it goes viral, reaching millions in potentially a matter of minutes. It's all about being in the right place at the right time. And social media is the "right" place. Users of social media are able to obtain news at a quicker pace than they would by reading a newspaper or watching the news on TV. Now, social media gets you news instantly. Is social media becoming the "new" news?



Term To Know: "Retweet" : a reposting of someone else's tweet
(definition taken from Twitter Help Center, FAQs at https://support.twitter.com/articles/77606-faqs-about-retweets)

"What is Twitter, a Social Network or a News Media?" Summary

What is Twitter, a Social Network or a News Media? By Haewoon Kwak, Changhyun Lee, Hosung Park, and Sue Moon

            This article quantitatively tested the process of how a tweet spreads and qualitatively observed the content of tweets in order to examine and test whether or not Twitter’s processes and information content supported the idea that Twitter is seemingly a use for the spreading of news. By observing 106 million tweets, along with 4,262 topics that were “trending” on Twitter (topics that are tweeted or “hashtagged” more than others), these researchers found that an average tweet that has been retweeted (adopted someone else’s tweet in such a way that your followers will be able to see that person’s tweet) reaches about 1,000 people and that approximately 85% of trending topics on Twitter are “headline or persistent news in nature” (“Conclusions,” page 10).

Full article at: http://cs.wellesley.edu/~cs315/Papers/What%20is%20twitter-a%20social%20net%20or%20news%20media.pdf