News sources are critical in communication studies. Analyses of news sources cited by social media users enable understanding the relationship
between the public and news reporting. This study focused on the citation of news sources in social media. Using the URL unshortening technique,
we analyzed the contents of hyperlinks in tweets sent during the 2012 Taiwan presidential election. We compared the patterns of social media citation among news agencies in Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, and Japan. We also identified the most cited Taiwanese news source on Twitter. This study combined computational technology and communication studies to develop a novel technique for exploring how social media interact with traditional mass media.