Understanding News Sharing in Social Media from the Diffusion of Innovations Perspective

Social media is becoming increasingly used as sources of news. The present study thus investigates the factors that may influence news sharing behavior in social media. Based on the diffusion of innovations theory, we propose several influential factors derived from online social networks which include opinion leadership, homophily, tie strength, and news preference. By incorporating social network analysis with the support of other statistical methods, we found that opinion leadership was the strongest factor predicting news sharing, followed by news preference and tie strength. Notably, we looked into the phenomenon of homophily at the network and individual levels. While homophily existed at the network level, such similarity actually hampered news sharing in users´ local networks. Implications of our work are also discussed.