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.

Abstract Mass media sentiment of financial news significantly influences investment decisions of investors. Hence, studying how this sentiment emerges is important. In years past, this was straightforward, often dictated by journalists who cover financial news, but this has become more complex now. In this paper, we focus on how social media sentiment affects mass media sentiment. Using data from Sina Weibo and Sina Finance (around 60 million weibos and 6.2 million news articles), we show that social media does influence mass media sentiment emergence for financial news. The sentiment consistency between social media reaction and prior news articles amplifies the persistence of mass media sentiment over time. By contrast, we found limited evidence of social media reducing the persistence of mass media sentiment over time. The results have significant implications for understanding how 2 types of media, treated separately in the literature, may be connected.