Media Professionals’ Opinions about Interactive Visualizations of Political Polarization during Brazilian Presidential Campaigns on Twitter

Interactive data visualization techniques are an important way to obtain information from large datasets. Data journalism is an emerging area that strongly makes use of such techniques. In this work we investigate the relationship between journalists (and media professionals) in their job routine and data visualization, with the main goal of understanding if these professionals know and use data visualization tools in their job context, as well as if they consider these resources to be important. For this, we present the results of a survey made with journalists and media professionals to analyze how interactive visualizations could help them to get insight or knowledge of such data, and if their use may improve and support these professionals\u27 activities. The results indicate that visualization and data analysis tools are still not easily accessible by those professionals, and therefore still less influential than they could be. However, most participants considered data visualization a valuable resource in their news production routines. As a contribution, we also identified positive points and understanding gaps of visualizations, as well as the perception of journalists and media professionals about getting information from data visualization

Exploring Sentiment Analysis on Twitter: Investigating Public Opinion on Migration in Brazil from 2015 to 2020

openTechnology has reshaped societal interaction and the expression of opinions. Migration is a prominent trend, and analysing social media discussions provides insights into societal perspectives. This thesis explores how events between 2015 and 2020 impacted Brazilian sentiment on Twitter about migrants and refugees. Its aim was to uncover the influence of key sociopolitical events on public sentiment, clarifying how these echoed in the digital realm. Four key objectives guided this research: (a) understanding public opinions on migrants and refugees, (b) investigating how events influenced Twitter sentiment, (c) identifying terms used in migration-related tweets, and (d) tracking sentiment shifts, especially concerning changes in government. Sentiment analysis using VADER (Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner) was employed to analyse tweet data. The use of computational methods in social sciences is gaining traction, yet no analysis has been conducted before to understand the sentiments of the Brazilian population regarding migration. The analysis underscored Twitter's role in reflecting and shaping public discourse, offering insights into how major events influenced discussions on migration. In conclusion, this study illuminated the landscape of Brazilian sentiment on migration, emphasizing the significance of innovative social media analysis methodologies for policymaking and societal inclusivity in the digital age

The Potential of Social Media Intelligence to Improve Peoples Lives: Social Media Data for Good

In this report, developed with support from Facebook, we focus on an approach to extract public value from social media data that we believe holds the greatest potential: data collaboratives. Data collaboratives are an emerging form of public-private partnership in which actors from different sectors exchange information to create new public value. Such collaborative arrangements, for example between social media companies and humanitarian organizations or civil society actors, can be seen as possible templates for leveraging privately held data towards the attainment of public goals

Disinformation and Fact-Checking in Contemporary Society

Funded by the European Media and Information Fund and research project PID2022-142755OB-I00

Network Propaganda

"Is social media destroying democracy? Are Russian propaganda or ""Fake news"" entrepreneurs on Facebook undermining our sense of a shared reality? A conventional wisdom has emerged since the election of Donald Trump in 2016 that new technologies and their manipulation by foreign actors played a decisive role in his victory and are responsible for the sense of a ""post-truth"" moment in which disinformation and propaganda thrives. Network Propaganda challenges that received wisdom through the most comprehensive study yet published on media coverage of American presidential politics from the start of the election cycle in April 2015 to the one year anniversary of the Trump presidency. Analysing millions of news stories together with Twitter and Facebook shares, broadcast television and YouTube, the book provides a comprehensive overview of the architecture of contemporary American political communications. Through data analysis and detailed qualitative case studies of coverage of immigration, Clinton scandals, and the Trump Russia investigation, the book finds that the right-wing media ecosystem operates fundamentally differently than the rest of the media environment. The authors argue that longstanding institutional, political, and cultural patterns in American politics interacted with technological change since the 1970s to create a propaganda feedback loop in American conservative media. This dynamic has marginalized centre-right media and politicians, radicalized the right wing ecosystem, and rendered it susceptible to propaganda efforts, foreign and domestic. For readers outside the United States, the book offers a new perspective and methods for diagnosing the sources of, and potential solutions for, the perceived global crisis of democratic politics.

Network Propaganda

"Is social media destroying democracy? Are Russian propaganda or ""Fake news"" entrepreneurs on Facebook undermining our sense of a shared reality? A conventional wisdom has emerged since the election of Donald Trump in 2016 that new technologies and their manipulation by foreign actors played a decisive role in his victory and are responsible for the sense of a ""post-truth"" moment in which disinformation and propaganda thrives. Network Propaganda challenges that received wisdom through the most comprehensive study yet published on media coverage of American presidential politics from the start of the election cycle in April 2015 to the one year anniversary of the Trump presidency. Analysing millions of news stories together with Twitter and Facebook shares, broadcast television and YouTube, the book provides a comprehensive overview of the architecture of contemporary American political communications. Through data analysis and detailed qualitative case studies of coverage of immigration, Clinton scandals, and the Trump Russia investigation, the book finds that the right-wing media ecosystem operates fundamentally differently than the rest of the media environment. The authors argue that longstanding institutional, political, and cultural patterns in American politics interacted with technological change since the 1970s to create a propaganda feedback loop in American conservative media. This dynamic has marginalized centre-right media and politicians, radicalized the right wing ecosystem, and rendered it susceptible to propaganda efforts, foreign and domestic. For readers outside the United States, the book offers a new perspective and methods for diagnosing the sources of, and potential solutions for, the perceived global crisis of democratic politics.

Semiotic resources and argumentative strategies in tweets about political TV shows in Chile

The main aim of this research is to explore the argumentative and semiotic resources used in tweets related to political TV shows in Chile in 2016. To achieve this, I carried out a qualitative investigation that incorporates principles from critical discourse studies (Wodak & Meyer, 2016) for the analysis of the resources employed by Twitter users to present their political views in this type of digital media. Previous studies in political discourse and social media (KhosraviNik & Unger, 2016; KhosraviNik & Zia, 2014), and specifically the discourse-historical approach (Reisigl & Wodak, 2016), have proved to be particularly useful to explore the argumentative strategies and semiotic resources involved in the discourse on political issues in different media. This research focuses on tweets about five Chilean political TV shows which encourage their audiences to extend the debate in a social media environment, showing hashtags and tweets. The data set comprises 39,684 hashtagged tweets from three months at the beginning, middle and end of the televised season. In the first stage of this research, I identify topics and diverse semiotic features in the whole data set. Among the topics identified in the data collection, those related to ethical concerns are the most frequent, alongside tweets related to public figures and institutions. The semiotic resources found in the data set were classified into overarching semiotic categories of verbal, visual and hypertextual. In the second stage, I analysed the interaction patterns present in the data and argumentative resources in a sample of tweets. To describe interaction patterns, I draw on Goffman’s (1981) model of interaction. I found that users addressed a wide variety of actors, not only among the participants of online or televised debates, but across the public sphere. The communication among these diverse actors blurred the boundaries between and within encounters, creating a new type of interaction that I called hybrid play. Regarding the diverse argumentative strategies identified in the sample, fallacies, including ad hominem, ad verecundiam, hasty generalization and straw man, were found. The other main discursive strategies analysed were topoi. There were several realizations of the topoi of burden and responsibility, related to issues of political contingency and users’ claims for action. Also present were topoi of urgency, comparison, decency, justice, human rights and history. Despite the claims that social media can allow manifestations of hostility or uncivil behaviour in relation to politics, the analysis showed that digitally mediated debates related to television shows in the Chilean context can be seen as an expansion of the public sphere in which users can participate to different degrees in political debates, criticizing the status quo and proposing their own political agendas, thereby potentially generating new spaces for political deliberation