Characteristically, propagation of news on the Internet is a rather complex scenario. Its comprehensive understanding requires a consideration of diverse facets such as audience, problem domain, channel and type of news being propagated. My dissertation focuses on the understanding of propagation of a specific type of news- news articles, on a particular subset of the Internet, the social media. While a number of studies have looked into the phenomenon of propagation in social media, fewer of these have examined the propagation of content, specifically news articles, published by news provider websites. My dissertation presents a set of network theory based methodologies to extract and analyze various implicit propagation networks formed as a result of news article sharing on Twitter. These methodologies cover aspects related to users' article sharing behavior, influence of the news provider's social media accounts, role of followers and similarities between propagation networks of news providers. Furthermore, it also includes useful inferences derived about the news article propagation phenomenon by using a population sized data sampled from Twitter over a nine-month period. It expands on the inferences from my published works and the challenges identified in the area of news article consumption and distribution on the Internet. My dissertation intends to provide important guidelines for researchers and organizations studying social media related phenomena to derive insights about customer behavior. From the perspective of online news consumption and distribution, my study has important implications for the audience's preference of news content delivery. It also facilitates news providers to gauge their performance on social media and for news editors to help develop editorial policies tailored for an online consumer base. Finally, my dissertation presents an extensive set of network based models and methodologies that can enrich the applied network science discipline.

Corporate crisis events such as cyber attacks, executive scandals, facility accidents, fraud, and product recalls can damage customer trust and firm reputation severely, which may lead to tremendous loss in sales and firm equity value. My research aims to integrate information available on the market to assist firms in tackling crisis events, and to provide insight for better decision making. We first study the impact of crisis events on firm performance. We build a hybrid deep learning model that utilizes information from financial news, social media, and historical stock prices to predict firm stock performance during firm crisis events. We develop new methodologies that can extract, select, and represent useful features from textual data. Our hybrid deep learning model achieves 68.8% prediction accuracy for firm stock movements. Furthermore, we explore the underlying mechanisms behind how stakeholders adopt and propagate event information on social media, as well as how this would impact firm stock movements during such events. We adopt an extended epidemiology model, SEIZ, to simulate the information propagation on social media during a crisis. The SEIZ model classifies people into four states (susceptible, exposed, infected, and skeptical). By modeling the propagation of firm-initiated information and user-initiated information on Twitter, we simulate the dynamic process of Twitter stakeholders transforming from one state to another. Based on the modeling results, we quantitatively measure how stakeholders adopt firm crisis information on Twitter over time. We then empirically evaluate the impact of different information adoption processes on firm stock performance. We observe that investors often react very positively when a higher portion of stakeholders adopt the firm-initiated information on Twitter, and negatively when a higher portion of stakeholders adopt user-initiated information. Additionally, we try to identify features that can indicate the firm stock movement during corporate events. We adopt Layer-wised Relevance Propagation (LRP) to extract language features that can be the predictive variables for stock surge and stock plunge. Based on our trained hybrid deep learning model, we generate relevance scores for language features in news titles and tweets, which can indicate the amount of contributions these features made to the final predictions of stock surge and plunge. / Doctor of Philosophy / Corporate crisis events such as cyber attacks, executive scandals, facility accidents, fraud, and product recalls can damage customer trust and firm reputation severely, which may lead to tremendous loss in sales and firm equity value. My research aims to integrate information available on the market to assist firms in tackling crisis events and providing insight for better decision making. We first study the impact of crisis events on firm performance. We investigate five types of crisis events for SandP 500 companies, with 14,982 related news titles and 4.3 million relevant tweets. We build an event-driven hybrid deep learning model that utilizes information from financial news, social media, and historical stock prices to predict firm stock performance during firm crisis events. Furthermore, we explore how stakeholders adopt and propagate event information on social media, as well as how this would impact firm stock movements during the events. Social media has become an increasingly important channel for corporate crisis management. However, little is known on how crisis information propagates on social media. We observe that investors often react very positively when a higher portion of stakeholders adopt the firm-initiated information on Twitter, and negatively when a higher portion of stakeholders adopt user-initiated information. In addition, we find that the language used in the crisis news and social media discussions can have surprising predictive power on the firm stock. Thus, we develop a methodology to identify the importance of text features associated with firm performance during crisis events, such as predictive words or phrases.