372 research outputs found
Illuminating an Ecosystem of Partisan Websites
This paper aims to shed light on alternative news media ecosystems that are
believed to have influenced opinions and beliefs by false and/or biased news
reporting during the 2016 US Presidential Elections. We examine a large,
professionally curated list of 668 hyper-partisan websites and their
corresponding Facebook pages, and identify key characteristics that mediate the
traffic flow within this ecosystem. We uncover a pattern of new websites being
established in the run up to the elections, and abandoned after. Such websites
form an ecosystem, creating links from one website to another, and by `liking'
each others' Facebook pages. These practices are highly effective in directing
user traffic internally within the ecosystem in a highly partisan manner, with
right-leaning sites linking to and liking other right-leaning sites and
similarly left-leaning sites linking to other sites on the left, thus forming a
filter bubble amongst news producers similar to the filter bubble which has
been widely observed among consumers of partisan news. Whereas there is
activity along both left- and right-leaning sites, right-leaning sites are more
evolved, accounting for a disproportionate number of abandoned websites and
partisan internal links. We also examine demographic characteristics of
consumers of hyper-partisan news and find that some of the more populous
demographic groups in the US tend to be consumers of more right-leaning sites.Comment: Published at The Web Conference 2018 (WWW 2018). Please cite the WWW
versio
There can be only one truth: Ideological segregation and online news communities in Ukraine
The paper examines ideological segregation among Ukrainian users in online environments, using as a case study partisan news communities on Vkontakte, the largest online platform in post-communist states. Its findings suggest that despite their insignificant numbers, partisan news communities attract substantial attention from Ukrainian users and can encourage the formation of isolated ideological cliques â or âecho chambersâ â that increase societal polarisation. The paper also investigates factors that predict usersâ interest in partisan content and establishes that the region of residence is the key predictor of selective consumption of pro-Ukrainian or pro-Russian partisan news content
A scoping review on the use of natural language processing in research on political polarization: trends and research prospects
As part of the âtext-as-dataâ movement, Natural Language Processing (NLP) provides a computational way to examine political polarization. We conducted a methodological scoping review of studies published since 2010 ( n = 154) to clarify how NLP research has conceptualized and measured political polarization, and to characterize the degree of integration of the two different research paradigms that meet in this research area. We identified biases toward US context (59%), Twitter data (43%) and machine learning approach (33%). Research covers different layers of the political public sphere (politicians, experts, media, or the lay public), however, very few studies involved more than one layer. Results indicate that only a few studies made use of domain knowledge and a high proportion of the studies were not interdisciplinary. Those studies that made efforts to interpret the results demonstrated that the characteristics of political texts depend not only on the political position of their authors, but also on other often-overlooked factors. Ignoring these factors may lead to overly optimistic performance measures. Also, spurious results may be obtained when causal relations are inferred from textual data. Our paper provides arguments for the integration of explanatory and predictive modeling paradigms, and for a more interdisciplinary approach to polarization research
Disentangling Structure and Style: Political Bias Detection in News by Inducing Document Hierarchy
We address an important gap in detection of political bias in news articles.
Previous works that perform supervised document classification can be biased
towards the writing style of each news outlet, leading to overfitting and
limited generalizability. Our approach overcomes this limitation by considering
both the sentence-level semantics and the document-level rhetorical structure,
resulting in a more robust and style-agnostic approach to detecting political
bias in news articles. We introduce a novel multi-head hierarchical attention
model that effectively encodes the structure of long documents through a
diverse ensemble of attention heads. While journalism follows a formalized
rhetorical structure, the writing style may vary by news outlet. We demonstrate
that our method overcomes this domain dependency and outperforms previous
approaches for robustness and accuracy. Further analysis demonstrates the
ability of our model to capture the discourse structures commonly used in the
journalism domain.Comment: Preprint. Under revie
Taking a stand on not taking a stand: media bias in the online reporting of COVID-19
Thesis (M.A.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2021This thesis was written to examine the digital communication strategies of three major news organizations when reporting on COVID-19 in the U.S. for bias. The research looked at social media posts, online article counts and themes, main websites of each organization and audio/visual broadcast segments from all three organizations posted online. This research used an advocacy approach, examining the tension between entertainment and journalism ethics by holding news organizations to journalism standards to see how they compare. Results showed that NPR and Fox News produced more online articles than MSNBC and linked to their own articles on twitter more. The audiovisual content from MSNBC and Fox News did not follow the code of ethics created by the Society of Professional Journalists. All three organizations used biased methods for providing information to the public, during a time period where public knowledge is key to managing a pandemic
Domestic terrorism or political protest? : Partisan cable news framing of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol
The attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, was a historical event that received widespread media attention in the days and weeks that followed. This study focuses on the differential framing techniques used by Fox News and CNN, specifically, in their coverage of January 6. Additionally, this study addresses the differential framing techniques used across different shows on the same network: âcommentary-basedâ shows and âinformation-basedâ shows. In doing so, this research builds upon the vast body of pre-existing news media framing research. This study finds that the differences in framing are more pronounced between Fox News and CNN than across the different shows on each network, thus providing an explanation for why Americans are so polarized about the events of January 6. Notably, Fox News highlights the peaceful aspects of January 6, labeling it a protest, whereas CNN stresses the idea of January 6 as an act of domestic terror. On a less significant level, the commentary-based shows utilized different framing techniques from their information-based counterparts. The commentary-based shows presented their audiences with a more emotional depiction of the news that more heavily relied on the anchorâs opinion
Political polarisation on social media in different national contexts
The present dissertation examines the phenomenon of political polarisation on social media.
Specifically, the dissertation addresses the question of how the intensity of polarisation and
the ideological lines along which it occurs might vary between different national contexts.
First, it explores the differences in the intensity of political polarisation on Twitter in 16
democratic countries (Article 1). Second, it examines the ideological lines along which
polarisation occurs in two non-Western contexts, specifically among Russian (Article 2) and
Ukrainian (Article 3) users of Vkontakte â a social media platform popular among users
from post-Soviet states. The dissertation demonstrates that the levels of political polarisation
differ dramatically between countries. In democracies, polarisation tends to be lowest in
multi-party systems with proportional electoral rules (e.g., Sweden), and the highest in
pluralist two-party systems (e.g., United States). It also shows that, in non-democratic non-
Western contexts, polarisation does not necessarily run along the leftâright spectrum or
party system lines. In authoritarian regimes or those with less stable party systems,
polarisation runs along the lines of other issues that are more politically relevant in a given
context. In Russia, polarisation manifests itself along pro-regime vs anti-regimes lines,
whereas in Ukraine, polarisation happens around geopolitical issues. Polarisation on social
media thus tends to reflect existing political cleavages and their intensity, in line with the
theory of political parallelism. The major implication of this dissertation in the context of
research into polarisation on social media is that findings on the topic from single-country
studies that come from Western democratic contexts should be interpreted with caution, as
they are not necessarily generalisable. To make generalisable inferences about the
relationship between social media and political polarisation, more comparative studies are
needed, as well as studies that take into account platform affordances and the causal
mechanisms that might drive polarisation
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