For a little while now, Twitter has been providing a live stream of hot topics to signify what subjects are currently trending on the site.  Do these topics mirror those found in mainstream news outlets or is the Twittersphere talking about different topics completely?

That was the question posed by a recent Spanish study into just what trends on Twitter.  The researchers began by mining Twitter for stories that reasonably reflect those that often appear in the mainstream press.  So events that interest a large number of people.

The topics were drawn from up to 62 countries over two three month periods in 2013 and 2014.  All in all, over 300,000 trending topics were analyzed, with some fascinating findings.

“The conclusion we have reached is that the geographic dissemination of news on social networks preserves some of the biases present in the dissemination of traditional news, like the fact that it tends to flow more from rich countries to poor countries,” the authors say.

A variety of biases

In addition to this socioeconomic condition, the research also found that there were biases around common languages.

“To summarize,” they say, “economic power conditions the dissemination of news on social networks among countries with different languages, while in the case of countries that share the same language, the fundamental conditioning factor is cultural similarity.”

Once trending topics on Twitter were analyzed, they were then compared with mainstream stories pulled using Google News, which was used for its own trending style service.

Crossover between Twitter and the mainstream

When the two were compared, it emerged that roughly half of the events reported in the mainstream media also found their way into the trending topics on Twitter.

The researchers were also interested in whether news stories broke first on Twitter, or whether the Twittersphere was merely following the mainstream.

Interestingly, it emerged that roughly 60% of news stories that were reported on both Twitter and in the mainstream, broke first on the social network.  Indeed, just 10% of stories would appear first in the press, before then trending on Twitter (with the remaining 30% breaking at roughly the same time).