"Our city will be the first to hold both summer and winter olympics" : a comparative analysis of how media coverage and public opinion were framed on social media in the lead up to the Beijing 2022 winter Olympic games

Beijing is the first city to host both the Summer and Winter Olympic Games. Mega sporting events such as the Olympic Games, which attract mass audiences, benefit greatly from social media. This article examines how the news coverage and public opinion about the Beijing 2022 were articulated on social media in the lead up to the Beijing 2022. We employed computational content analysis to examine 9,439 individual posts and 450 official media posts that appeared before the Beijing 2022 Olympics. We also used ROSTCM6 to investigate the sentiment of official media and public opinion toward Beijing 2022. The results of this study reveal that members of public are more inclined to highlight certain aspects of Beijing 2022 based on their individual perspectives. Official media, whose work generally aligns with the government's interests. Through a sentiment analysis of these posts, we found strongly positive attitudes concerning Beijing 2022 among the Chinese public and the media. Our results provide ample evidence of an overall relative convergence of positions between public opinion and news coverage about the Beijing 2022, despite their divergences. This study indicates that social media presents itself as a space for broader public statements, and empowers ordinary people to discuss China's social issues of concern. Meanwhile, official media represents the government's position, strategically framing Beijing 2022 as a landmark event in the new era of China

The Specifics of the Internal Image of the People’s Republic of China in News Publications

This study is aimed to analyze the methods of forming the internal image of the People’s Republic of China in the domestic media as part of the coverage of an initially negative topic — the coronavirus epidemic, as well as characterizing the PRC’s strategy for positioning its own image.Aim. Reveal the specifics of the coverage of the COVID-19 epidemic, considering it as a method of forming the internal political image of the People’s Republic of China in the online news media.Tasks. Determine the techniques used by domestic news network media to form the state image among the audience, based on a content analysis of a corpus of Chinese articles on the topic of the coronavirus epidemic.Methods. In order to determine the specifics of the coverage of the epidemic in the Chinese media, a qualitative and quantitative content analysis was carried out using a set of parameters developed by the authors, which includes the possibility of sampling, lexical heading analysis, sentiment analysis, and frame analysis.Results. The government of the PRC is able to form a positive discourse in covering an initially negative situation, such as the spread of the COVID-19 virus and the resulting pandemic, which is fully reflected both in the headlines and in the tone of the texts and the use of certain frames. Such an opportunity is provided by such factors as: the state’s ability to control the press at a high level, the Golden Shield international information filtering system, which is specific to the People’s Republic of China, censorship and taboo coverage of a number of topics that are undesirable from the official point of view of the Communist Party of China.Conclusion. When analyzing the Chinese sample corpora, it was concluded that the Chinese government is pursuing a targeted policy to create a positive image through high control over local news publications. The internal image formation is in line with the concept of building a socialist society with Chinese characteristics, promoting the construction of a community of common destiny for mankind, fighting hegemony and imperialism in the world, resolutely defending national sovereignty, security and technological development, and promoting cooperation under the “One Belt, One Road” Initiative

Visual Affect Around the World: A Large-scale Multilingual Visual Sentiment Ontology

Every culture and language is unique. Our work expressly focuses on the uniqueness of culture and language in relation to human affect, specifically sentiment and emotion semantics, and how they manifest in social multimedia. We develop sets of sentiment- and emotion-polarized visual concepts by adapting semantic structures called adjective-noun pairs, originally introduced by Borth et al. (2013), but in a multilingual context. We propose a new language-dependent method for automatic discovery of these adjective-noun constructs. We show how this pipeline can be applied on a social multimedia platform for the creation of a large-scale multilingual visual sentiment concept ontology (MVSO). Unlike the flat structure in Borth et al. (2013), our unified ontology is organized hierarchically by multilingual clusters of visually detectable nouns and subclusters of emotionally biased versions of these nouns. In addition, we present an image-based prediction task to show how generalizable language-specific models are in a multilingual context. A new, publicly available dataset of >15.6K sentiment-biased visual concepts across 12 languages with language-specific detector banks, >7.36M images and their metadata is also released.Comment: 11 pages, to appear at ACM MM'1

The disrespected state: China’s struggle for recognition through ‘soft power’

This study examines the Western-originated International Relations (IR) concept of Soft Power in the context of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In order to bring more nuance to the particular localised phenomena, the thesis presents three different approaches to the study of soft power: qualitative rhetorical analysis, media analysis and automated sentiment analysis. The results show that soft power is envisioned within the PRC as a political tool for international and domestic use, that the economy is where China has the most soft power potential in Western media, and that the PRC soft power policies are driven by emotions rather than rational calculation, guided by perception of disrespect. The contribution of the study is thus divided into three parts. Firstly, a discourse analysis of relevant Chinese academic journal articles published on the Mainland in Chinese 2000-2015 (n=31) shows that soft power rhetoric aims at national identity formation using such category arguments as ‘Anti-Westernisation’ and ‘cultural security’. In essence, the analysed soft power rhetoric formulates Chinese culture as being under threat from globalisation and Westernisation. Secondly, the study applies media analysis to interpret popular culture produced by the PRC public diplomacy bureaucracy. The results find negative dispositions vis-à-vis ‘self’ and ‘other’, as well as in-group/out-group symbolism in the analysed popular culture texts. Thirdly, to quantify China’s Western media image as part of its soft power push, the study applies an automated dictionary method to analyse two Reuters news article corpora covering the years 1996–1997 and 2008–2009 (n=1,400,000). Using automated content classification, the data is first geocoded into China-, Japan-, South Korea-, Taiwan-, and Hong Kong-related coverage and then further categorised into cultural, political, and economic topics. An automated sentiment analysis is applied to each category to quantify the tendency of the articles. The results emphasise the importance of economy in China related coverage, whereby the assumption of Chinese public diplomacy is not supported: no categorical negative Western media slant against China in comparison to other East Asian regions is found. The study demonstrates that the phenomenon referred to as soft power within the PRC tackles the challenges of modernisation and progress by placing emphasis on cultural safety and national image construction amid the perceived threats of globalisation and Westernisation. This is seen as an answer for the Chinese state in search of national identity, legitimacy and communal acceptance, still struggling with a collective perception of disrespect stemming from historical Western hegemony

Data Innovation for International Development: An overview of natural language processing for qualitative data analysis

Availability, collection and access to quantitative data, as well as its limitations, often make qualitative data the resource upon which development programs heavily rely. Both traditional interview data and social media analysis can provide rich contextual information and are essential for research, appraisal, monitoring and evaluation. These data may be difficult to process and analyze both systematically and at scale. This, in turn, limits the ability of timely data driven decision-making which is essential in fast evolving complex social systems. In this paper, we discuss the potential of using natural language processing to systematize analysis of qualitative data, and to inform quick decision-making in the development context. We illustrate this with interview data generated in a format of micro-narratives for the UNDP Fragments of Impact project