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Analysis of The News Spreading Structure on Social Media Sites

Student: Murzova Irina

Supervisor: Elizaveta Polukhina

Faculty: Faculty of Sociology

Educational Programme: Bachelor

Final Grade: 8

Year of Graduation: 2014

<p>This project related to analysis of the news spreading structure on social media sites. It is mainly intended to compare the structure of two types of news: &laquo;true to life&raquo; and &laquo;fake&raquo; news by using Social Network Analysis methods.</p><p>This study based on theoretical model of &ldquo;two-step flow of communication&rdquo; proposed by Paul Lazarsfeld. In accordance with this approach the most effective spreading mass media information goes though opinion leaders, which have a strong influence on public opinion. So this structure can be seen also on online social media sites. This project provides sequential description and classification of present online study methods and research practice of using Social Network Analysis in online studies.</p><p>First objective of the study is to approve using Social Media Monitoring tools (Wobot) as method of gathering data and the sampling framing. This part of the work gives detailed description of the main system&rsquo;s features, sampling construction process and data gathering procedure</p><p>Next part of the research devoted to comprehensive definition of the &ldquo;fake news&rdquo; concept. The problem is that there is no scientific and unequivocal definition of &ldquo;fake news&rdquo;. So this object develops this concept, gives possible criteria for &ldquo;fake news&rdquo; identification on social media sites.&nbsp;</p><p>One of the main objective of the study &ndash; comparison of two type of news spreading structure on social media sites &ndash; was examined by analysis of 6 cases (3 &laquo;true to life&raquo; and 3 &laquo;fake&raquo; news, which was spreading on Twitter, April-May, 2014). The procedure of network analysis was done via special program tool (Gephi): graph structure visualization, network metrics, news description, and source estimation.</p><p>The final objective identify &ldquo;opinions leaders&rdquo; of the network structure, the main differences was founded in mechanisms of &laquo;true to life&raquo; and &laquo;fake&raquo; news spreading. Fakes (fake twitter-accounts, artificially created profiles) was analyzed, the main markers of such actors was described. Moreover, the comparison analysis between bots and fakes was done by using mentioned markers and collected data.</p><p>The main findings of the research is an explanation of differences between the network structures of two types of news via describing activity of bot and fake accounts accounts. It concludes artificial culture of online communication related to the news on Twitter.</p>

Full text (added June 6, 2014) (592.38 Kb)

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