We offer free and open access to two core resources for social media and journalism research: 1) A data collection and enrichment pipeline which allows to generate custom datasets that include both news content and the social interactions over them, starting from a pre-defined set of news sources. 2) A dataset which includes news articles from major U.S. news outlets and associated sharing activities on Twitter, covering the tweets content and the author profiles. First, we build a robust pipeline for collecting datasets describing news sharing; the pipeline takes as input a list of news sources and generates a large collection of articles, of the accounts that provide them on the social media either directly or by retweeting, and of the social activities performed by these accounts. The dataset is published on Harvard Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/5XRZLH Second, we also provide a large-scale dataset that can be used to study the social behavior of Twitter users and their involvement in the dissemination of news items. Finally we show an application of our data collection in the context of political stance classification and we suggest other potential usages of the presented resources. The code is published on GitHub: https://github.com/DataSciencePolimi/NewsAnalyzer The details of our approach is published in a paper at ICWSM 2019 accessible online on AAAI library: https://aaai.org/ojs/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/3256 You can cite the paper as: Giovanni Brena, Marco Brambilla, Stefano Ceri, Marco Di Giovanni, Francesco Pierri, Giorgia Ramponi. News Sharing User Behaviour on Twitter: A Comprehensive Data Collection of News Articles and Social Interactions. AAAI ICWSM 2019, pp. 592-597.

1. News Sharing User Behaviour on Twitter:
a Comprehensive Data Collection of
News Articles and Social Interactions
Giovanni Brena, Marco Brambilla, Stefano Ceri, Marco Di Giovanni, Francesco Pierri, Giorgia Ramponi
Politecnico di Milano
@marcobrambi
marco.brambilla@polimi.it
http://datascience.deib.polimi.it/

2. • 69 news sources (online newspapers and news agencies)
• 8 news categories
• 300K news articles
• 1MLN tweets sharing the news
• 40K user profiles authoring the tweets
• On dataverse.harvard.edu:
https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/5XRZLH
TheDataset

3. • Articles details: source, category, topic
TheDataset

4. • Enriched user profile: age, sex, ethnicity, geo-localization and Twitter profile
• Twitter network of the user: followers, friends, mentions, and retweets
TheDataset

5. • Sharing behaviour analysis: sharing and reaction stats, vocabulary and most frequent hashtags
TheDataset

6. TheDataCollection&EnrichmentPipeline
Implementation available on GitHub:
https://github.com/DataSciencePolimi/NewsAnalyzer

7. • Prediction of U.S. 2018 Midterm election results by
state based on classification of news sharing behaviour
• Rep. vs. Dem. Affiliation achieved 90% accuracy
at user level
• Only 5 states wrongly predicted results
WhatdoIuseitfor? …Anythingyouwant

8. Marco Brambilla
@marcobrambi
marco.brambilla@polimi.it
Politecnico di Milano, Italy
http://datascience.deib.polimi.it/
News Sharing User Behaviour on Twitter:
a Comprehensive Data Collection of
News Articles and Social Interactions