Does Bad News Spread Faster?

Abstract

Bad news travels fast. Although this concept may be intuitively accepted, there has been little evidence to confirm that the propagation of bad news differs from that of good news. In this paper, we examine the effect of user perspective on his or her sharing of a controversial news story. Social media not only offers insight into human behavior but has also developed as a source of news. In this paper, we define the spreading of news by tracking selected tweets in Twitter as they are shared over time to create models of user sharing behavior. Many news events can be viewed as positive or negative. In this paper, we compare and contrast tweets about these news events among general users, while monitoring the tweet frequency for each event over time to ensure that news events are comparable with respect to user interest. In addition, we track the tweets of a controversial event between two different groups of users (i.e., those who view the event as positive and those who view it as negative). As a result, we are able to make assessments based on a single event from two different perspectives.