13,277 research outputs found
QUOTUS: The Structure of Political Media Coverage as Revealed by Quoting Patterns
Given the extremely large pool of events and stories available, media outlets
need to focus on a subset of issues and aspects to convey to their audience.
Outlets are often accused of exhibiting a systematic bias in this selection
process, with different outlets portraying different versions of reality.
However, in the absence of objective measures and empirical evidence, the
direction and extent of systematicity remains widely disputed.
In this paper we propose a framework based on quoting patterns for
quantifying and characterizing the degree to which media outlets exhibit
systematic bias. We apply this framework to a massive dataset of news articles
spanning the six years of Obama's presidency and all of his speeches, and
reveal that a systematic pattern does indeed emerge from the outlet's quoting
behavior. Moreover, we show that this pattern can be successfully exploited in
an unsupervised prediction setting, to determine which new quotes an outlet
will select to broadcast. By encoding bias patterns in a low-rank space we
provide an analysis of the structure of political media coverage. This reveals
a latent media bias space that aligns surprisingly well with political ideology
and outlet type. A linguistic analysis exposes striking differences across
these latent dimensions, showing how the different types of media outlets
portray different realities even when reporting on the same events. For
example, outlets mapped to the mainstream conservative side of the latent space
focus on quotes that portray a presidential persona disproportionately
characterized by negativity.Comment: To appear in the Proceedings of WWW 2015. 11pp, 10 fig. Interactive
visualization, data, and other info available at
http://snap.stanford.edu/quotus
Selection Bias in News Coverage: Learning it, Fighting it
News entities must select and filter the coverage they broadcast through
their respective channels since the set of world events is too large to be
treated exhaustively. The subjective nature of this filtering induces biases
due to, among other things, resource constraints, editorial guidelines,
ideological affinities, or even the fragmented nature of the information at a
journalist's disposal. The magnitude and direction of these biases are,
however, widely unknown. The absence of ground truth, the sheer size of the
event space, or the lack of an exhaustive set of absolute features to measure
make it difficult to observe the bias directly, to characterize the leaning's
nature and to factor it out to ensure a neutral coverage of the news. In this
work, we introduce a methodology to capture the latent structure of media's
decision process on a large scale. Our contribution is multi-fold. First, we
show media coverage to be predictable using personalization techniques, and
evaluate our approach on a large set of events collected from the GDELT
database. We then show that a personalized and parametrized approach not only
exhibits higher accuracy in coverage prediction, but also provides an
interpretable representation of the selection bias. Last, we propose a method
able to select a set of sources by leveraging the latent representation. These
selected sources provide a more diverse and egalitarian coverage, all while
retaining the most actively covered events
Whose Advantage? Measuring Attention Dynamics across YouTube and Twitter on Controversial Topics
The ideological asymmetries have been recently observed in contested online
spaces, where conservative voices seem to be relatively more pronounced even
though liberals are known to have the population advantage on digital
platforms. Most prior research, however, focused on either one single platform
or one single political topic. Whether an ideological group garners more
attention across platforms and/or topics, and how the attention dynamics evolve
over time, have not been explored. In this work, we present a quantitative
study that links collective attention across two social platforms -- YouTube
and Twitter, centered on online activities surrounding popular videos of three
controversial political topics including Abortion, Gun control, and Black Lives
Matter over 16 months. We propose several sets of video-centric metrics to
characterize how online attention is accumulated for different ideological
groups. We find that neither side is on a winning streak: left-leaning videos
are overall more viewed, more engaging, but less tweeted than right-leaning
videos. The attention time series unfold quicker for left-leaning videos, but
span a longer time for right-leaning videos. Network analysis on the early
adopters and tweet cascades show that the information diffusion for
left-leaning videos tends to involve centralized actors; while that for
right-leaning videos starts earlier in the attention lifecycle. In sum, our
findings go beyond the static picture of ideological asymmetries in digital
spaces and provide a set of methods to quantify attention dynamics across
different social platforms.Comment: Accepted into ICWSM 2022. 11-page main paper and 11-page appendi
A National Dialogue on Health Information Technology and Privacy
Increasingly, government leaders recognize that solving the complex problems facing America today will require more than simply keeping citizens informed. Meeting challenges like rising health care costs, climate change and energy independence requires increased level of collaboration. Traditionally, government agencies have operated in silos -- separated not only from citizens, but from each other, as well. Nevertheless, some have begun to reach across and outside of government to access the collective brainpower of organizations, stakeholders and individuals.The National Dialogue on Health Information Technology and Privacy was one such initiative. It was conceived by leaders in government who sought to demonstrate that it is not only possible, but beneficial and economical, to engage openly and broadly on an issue that is both national in scope and deeply relevant to the everyday lives of citizens. The results of this first-of-its-kind online event are captured in this report, together with important lessons learned along the way.This report served as a call to action. On his first full day in office, President Obama put government on notice that this new, more collaborative model can no longer be confined to the efforts of early adopters. He called upon every executive department and agency to "harness new technology" and make government "transparent, participatory, and collaborative." Government is quickly transitioning to a new generation of managers and leaders, for whom online collaboration is not a new frontier but a fact of everyday life. We owe it to them -- and the citizens we serve -- to recognize and embrace the myriad tools available to fulfill the promise of good government in the 21st Century.Key FindingsThe Panel recommended that the Administration give stakeholders the opportunity to further participate in the discussion of heath IT and privacy through broader outreach and by helping the public to understand the value of a person-centered view of healthcare information technology
Identifying Users with Opposing Opinions in Twitter Debates
In recent times, social media sites such as Twitter have been extensively
used for debating politics and public policies. These debates span millions of
tweets and numerous topics of public importance. Thus, it is imperative that
this vast trove of data is tapped in order to gain insights into public opinion
especially on hotly contested issues such as abortion, gun reforms etc. Thus,
in our work, we aim to gauge users' stance on such topics in Twitter. We
propose ReLP, a semi-supervised framework using a retweet-based label
propagation algorithm coupled with a supervised classifier to identify users
with differing opinions. In particular, our framework is designed such that it
can be easily adopted to different domains with little human supervision while
still producing excellent accuracyComment: Corrected typos in Section 4, under "Visibly Opinionated Users". The
numbers did not add up. Results remain unchange
Anomalous Contagion and Renormalization in Dynamical Networks with Nodal Mobility
The common real-world feature of individuals migrating through a network --
either in real space or online -- significantly complicates understanding of
network processes. Here we show that even though a network may appear static on
average, underlying nodal mobility can dramatically distort outbreak profiles.
Highly nonlinear dynamical regimes emerge in which increasing mobility either
amplifies or suppresses outbreak severity. Predicted profiles mimic recent
outbreaks of real-space contagion (social unrest) and online contagion
(pro-ISIS support). We show that this nodal mobility can be renormalized in a
precise way for a particular class of dynamical networks
Analysing Timelines of National Histories across Wikipedia Editions: A Comparative Computational Approach
Portrayals of history are never complete, and each description inherently
exhibits a specific viewpoint and emphasis. In this paper, we aim to
automatically identify such differences by computing timelines and detecting
temporal focal points of written history across languages on Wikipedia. In
particular, we study articles related to the history of all UN member states
and compare them in 30 language editions. We develop a computational approach
that allows to identify focal points quantitatively, and find that Wikipedia
narratives about national histories (i) are skewed towards more recent events
(recency bias) and (ii) are distributed unevenly across the continents with
significant focus on the history of European countries (Eurocentric bias). We
also establish that national historical timelines vary across language
editions, although average interlingual consensus is rather high. We hope that
this paper provides a starting point for a broader computational analysis of
written history on Wikipedia and elsewhere
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