Gatekeeping has been identified as a largely top-down process, with elites such as government actors, PR sources, experts and journalists filtering the information that is incorporated in the news output and then distributed to mass audiences (Shoemaker & Reese, 2001). However in the past ten years, scholars have welcomed the arrival of social media as a potential catalyst for increased user involvement. Whereas it has become clear that the integration of user contributions in the news production process remains fairly limited (e.g. Authors), other studies suggest that users may play a bigger role in the re-distribution and dissemination of mass media content in their networks on social media platforms (Singer, 2014). In other words, elite sources and media outlets maintain their role as primary gatekeepers in the networked society, while social media allow users to act as secondary gatekeepers by giving visibility to certain media content that they share within their network. Until now, however, little is known about the processes underlying the secondary gatekeeping process of news content on social media platforms. Therefore the aim of this paper is to investigate the re-distribution of tweets originating from eight online news outlets (De Morgen, Het Laatste Nieuws, Het Nieuwsblad, Newsmonkey, Apache, De Correspondent, Algemeen Dagblad and NRC Handelsblad). Our research questions are twofold. First, as the spread of a news outlet’s tweet depends on its followers’ followers we ask how structural characteristics such as the extent to which there are information brokers in the network or the importance of the individual followers play a role in the dissemination of tweets. Second, we examine the identity of individual users that take significant positions in the network, more specifically distinguishing elite and audience sources in the secondary gatekeeping process. In terms of analyses, retweets (N=418) of messages originating from the eight news outlets were collected in the beginning of November 2015 ...