Detecting Extreme Ideologies in Shifting Landscapes: an Automatic & Context-Agnostic Approach

In democratic countries, the ideology landscape is foundational to individual and collective political action; conversely, fringe ideology drives Ideologically Motivated Violent Extremism (IMVE). Therefore, quantifying ideology is a crucial first step to an ocean of downstream problems, such as; understanding and countering IMVE, detecting and intervening in disinformation campaigns, and broader empirical opinion dynamics modeling. However, online ideology detection faces two significant hindrances. Firstly, the ground truth that forms the basis for ideology detection is often prohibitively labor-intensive for practitioners to collect, requires access to domain experts and is specific to the context of its collection (i.e., time, location, and platform). Secondly, to circumvent this expense, researchers generate ground truth via other ideological signals (like hashtags used or politicians followed). However, the bias this introduces has not been quantified and often still requires expert intervention. This work presents an end-to-end ideology detection pipeline applicable to large-scale datasets. We construct context-agnostic and automatic ideological signals from widely available media slant data; show the derived pipeline is performant, compared to pipelines of common ideology signals and state-of-the-art baselines; employ the pipeline for left-right ideology, and (the more concerning) detection of extreme ideologies; generate psychosocial profiles of the inferred ideological groups; and, generate insights into their morality and preoccupations

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