Title: Demographics of News Sharing in the U.S. Twittersphere,
Abstract: The widespread adoption and dissemination of online news through social media
systems have been revolutionizing many segments of our society and ultimately
our daily lives. In these systems, users can play a central role as they share
content to their friends. Despite that, little is known about news spreaders in
social media. In this paper, we provide the first of its kind in-depth
characterization of news spreaders in social media. In particular, we
investigate their demographics, what kind of content they share, and the
audience they reach. Among our main findings, we show that males and white
users tend to be more active in terms of sharing news, biasing the news
audience to the interests of these demographic groups. Our results also
quantify differences in interests of news sharing across demographics, which
has implications for personalized news digests.