News sharing on Twitter: A nationally comparative study

The utility of Twitter as a medium for public engagement with news events has been well documented. Research has particularly highlighted the importance of Twitter as a space for the rapid assembly of ad hoc publics (Bruns & Burgess, 2015) around breaking news events, aided also by the availability of hashtags as a flexible mechanism for collecting all tweets marked as relevant to a specific topic (Rambukkana, 2015). In this, Twitter arguably even surpasses Facebook, as its flat, non- reciprocal, weak -tie network facilitates the dissemination of news more effectively than the hierarchical, reciprocal, strong -tie structure implemented by Facebook (Dewan & Kumaraguru, 2014)..