Proceedings of the Thirteenth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2019) Different Spirals of Sameness: A Study of Content Sharing in Mainstream and Alternative Media Benjamin D. Horne,* Jeppe Nørregaard,y Sibel Adalı* Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute*, Technical University of Denmarky [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] Abstract Vos, and Shoemaker 2009; Allcott and Gentzkow 2017; Mele et al. 2017). Thus, we may have a more diverse set of In this paper, we analyze content sharing between news news to read than in years past, but the standards of quality sources in the alternative and mainstream media using a dataset of 713K articles and 194 sources. We find that content have wavered, creating a new set of concerns. sharing happens in tightly formed communities, and these This rise in low-quality and potentially malicious news communities represent relatively homogeneous portions of producers has been the focus of many recent studies such the media landscape. Through a mix-method analysis, we as those focusing on detecting false content (Potthast et al. find several primary content sharing behaviors. First, we find 2017; Popat et al. 2016; Singhania, Fernandez, and Rao that the vast majority of shared articles are only shared with 2017; Horne et al. 2018; Baly et al. 2018). Some other stud- similar news sources (i.e. same community). Second, we find ies have focused on the tactics used to spread low-quality that despite these echo-chambers of sharing, specific sources, news, such as the use of social bots (Shao et al. 2017) such as The Drudge Report, mix content from both main- stream and conspiracy communities. Third, we show that and the structures of headlines to get higher attention and while these differing communities do not always share news clicks (Horne and Adalı 2017; Chakraborty et al. 2016). One articles, they do report on the same events, but often with lesser studied area of the alternative media universe is con- competing and counter-narratives. Overall, we find that the tent sharing (or content republishing, imitation, replication). news is homogeneous within communities and diverse in be- While in the past content sharing in the mainstream media tween, creating different spirals of sameness. was used to meet demand, be timely, and keep up with com- peting news agencies, it may be used more maliciously in 1 Introduction today’s news environment. For example, just as bot-driven misinformation in social networks, content sharing can be Researchers in Communications have studied content shar- used to make particular stories or narratives seem more im- ing in journalism for quite some time (Boczkowski 2010; portant, more widely reported, and thus, more credible. Graber 1971; Noelle-Neumann and Mathes 1987; Shoe- In this paper, we begin to explore this behavior. Specifi- maker and Reese 2013). This long line of research has cally, we analyze content sharing on a large dataset (713K shown that news organizations often imitate each other in articles and 194 sources) across both the mainstream and order to be competitive and meet demand. Various reasons alternative landscapes, with news sources of varying verac- for this behavior have been discussed, such as the popular- ity. We show that, when formulated as a network, news pro- ity of the Internet (Mitchelstein and Boczkowski 2010) and ducers share content in tightly connected communities. Fur- changes in the news demand structure (Boczkowski 2010). thermore, these communities represent distinct parts of the This behavior was even discussed as early as the 1950’s, media ecosystem, such as U.S. mainstream media, left-wing where it was said that “many newspapers feature the same blogs, and right-wing conspiracy media. With this commu- news stories atop their front pages (Boczkowski 2010; Breed nity framework, we employ mix-methods analysis to bet- 1955).” It has been argued that because of this increased con- ter understand what types of content sharing behavior ex- tent copying, the news has become homogeneous and sig- ist within and between these communities. We observe four nificantly less diverse (Boczkowski 2010; Klinenberg 2005; primary practices in this data. First, news content is often Glasser 1992). replicated in echo-chambers, where the copied content is However, today this homogenized view of the news has only published by other producers within the community. been complicated by the rise of “alternative” media. Specifi- This may mean a high quality investigative piece of re- cally, the rise of false, hyper-partisan, and propagandist news porting or a wild conspiracy theory may be equally copied producers has created a media landscape where there are within the network that originated it. Second, despite the competing narratives around the same event (Starbird 2017) tight community structure of the content sharing network, and no gatekeepers to curate quality information (Reese, specific sources mix content from both mainstream news Copyright c 2019, Association for the Advancement of Artificial and conspiracy news. This behavior illustrates a dangerous Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. practice, which can falsely elevate the perceived credibil- 257 ity of conspiracy-spreading sources. Third, many news arti- large number of topics/events. Additionally, our analysis in- cles are not shared across communities, but the broad topics corporates both exact and partial matching algorithms, pro- and events featured in the articles can be very similar, many viding a more extended look at content sharing than the times in the form of competing contemporaneous narratives. previous two studies. Lastly, we utilize external credibility Lastly, we observe a more unique behavior in which the con- and bias assessments to better characterize the sources who spiracy media reacts to a mistake in the mainstream media, are sharing content, which allows us to conduct extensive ultimately providing a reason to distrust the mainstream me- new case studies that have not been shown in the literature. dia. We hope that this work, in combination with these previous Overall, we find that the homogeneous view of news (or works, can be a strong building-block in developing theory to borrow a term from (Boczkowski 2010): “spiral of same- about content sharing as a disinformation tactic. ness”) still exist, but those “spirals of sameness” are, for the most part, different in each distinct parts of the news ecosys- 3 Methods tem. Within the same community, multiple processes work Data simultaneously to amplify certain narratives around current events as well as to undermine the credibility of some high We collected articles from a broad spectrum of sources. We quality news outlets. In essence, this ”spiral of sameness” scraped the RSS feeds of each news source twice a day start- now also actively works to create a type of otherness that ing on 02/02/2018 using the Python libraries feedparser and feeds the creation of more divisive news and an overall con- goose. For source selection, we start with mainstream outlets fusing information environment. (from both the U.S. and the U.K.) and alternative sources that are mentioned in other misinformation studies (Starbird 2017; Horne and Adalı 2018; Baly et al. 2018). We then 2 Related Work use the Google Search API to expand the number of sources There are two recent studies that have focused on content in the collection. Specifically, we query Google with the ti- sharing in today’s media ecosystem. The first study on con- tles of the previously collected articles and add any source tent sharing in alternative media focuses on a specific topic that appears in the top 10 pages of Google and is not al- in 2016: the Syrian Civil Defense (Starbird et al. 2018). This ready in our collection list. This process is repeated until we study uses mix-methods to analyze the content replication have a large sample of sources from both mainstream and practices by alternative news sites reporting on various as- alternative news. In addition to scraping article content, we pects of the Syrian Civil Defense. The authors used Twit- capture the UTC timestamp of when the article was pub- ter as a the starting point of the data collection, and ex- lished. Note, we do not include small local news sources or tended to the websites cited in the Twitter data. With this sources that did not have operational RSS feeds, which sig- data, the authors demonstrated the spread of competing nar- nificantly reduces the size of the expected source set. Our ratives through content sharing. They found that the alterna- final dataset contains 194 sources with over 713K articles tive news sources had both news-wire as well as news ag- between 02/02/2018 and 11/30/2018. Since this collection gregator type services. Additionally, they found that a small process happens multiple times a day, we have nearly every number of authors generate content that is spread widely article published by a source after it is added to the collec- in the alternative news. They also found that government- tion. funded media were prevalent in the production these anti- White Helmet narratives. Building Content Sharing Networks The second study approaches content republishing from a Once our data collection is complete, we construct a ver- more general setting (Horne and Adalı 2018). Specifically, batim content sharing network. We take a similar, but more the authors collected news data from 92 news sources, that refined, approach to (Horne and Adalı 2018). included both mainstream and alternative news. The articles We employ a three step method to build the network: collected were not focused on any specific topic as was done 1. We build a Term Frequency Inverse Document Frequency in the study discussed above (Starbird 2017). Horne and (TFIDF) matrix for each 5 day period in the dataset.