Digital platforms in the news industry: how social media platforms impact traditional media news viewership
研究发现社交媒体帖子数量能预测次日传统媒体对同一股票的新闻观看量，且情绪越强烈或正面、认证帖子越多时效果越强，表明社交媒体是注意力的驱动者而非信息渠道。
We examine how social media plays the role of an attention driver for traditional media. Social media attracts and channels attention to a topic. This attention triggers people to seek further information that is reported professionally in traditional media. Specifically, the volume of social media posts about a stock influences the attention to this stock the next day, proxied by the viewership of news articles on the same stock published the next day. We test this hypothesis in the stock market context because social media is less likely than traditional media to diffuse fundamental information in the stock market. Analysing stock-related news articles and stock-related social media posts from Sina Finance and Sina Weibo, we find that the social media post volume of a stock at time t-1 is associated with the traditional media viewership of the same stock at time t. This effect is amplified when social media sentiment about the stock is more intense or positive, and with an increase in the volume of verified social media posts about the stock. Our results provide evidence that social media platforms act as attention drivers, which differ from the information channel functions discussed in prior literature.