Sport in a Credit Crunched Consumer Culture

This brief rapid response article suggests a few ways in which modern competitive sport and large-scale sport events have developed in line with the logic of (late) capitalist modernity. It considers the impact of the credit crunch for recent trends in sport and suggests that the sociological study of sport faces the same concerns as other sociological domains of interest during the current economic conditions whilst having its own specific public issues and private troubles to consider.Sport, Physical Activity, Credit Crunch, Capitalism, Consumer Culture

This Just In: Fake News Packs a Lot in Title, Uses Simpler, Repetitive Content in Text Body, More Similar to Satire than Real News

The problem of fake news has gained a lot of attention as it is claimed to have had a significant impact on 2016 US Presidential Elections. Fake news is not a new problem and its spread in social networks is well-studied. Often an underlying assumption in fake news discussion is that it is written to look like real news, fooling the reader who does not check for reliability of the sources or the arguments in its content. Through a unique study of three data sets and features that capture the style and the language of articles, we show that this assumption is not true. Fake news in most cases is more similar to satire than to real news, leading us to conclude that persuasion in fake news is achieved through heuristics rather than the strength of arguments. We show overall title structure and the use of proper nouns in titles are very significant in differentiating fake from real. This leads us to conclude that fake news is targeted for audiences who are not likely to read beyond titles and is aimed at creating mental associations between entities and claims.Comment: Published at The 2nd International Workshop on News and Public Opinion at ICWS

The Impact of Crowds on News Engagement: A Reddit Case Study

Today, users are reading the news through social platforms. These platforms are built to facilitate crowd engagement, but not necessarily disseminate useful news to inform the masses. Hence, the news that is highly engaged with may not be the news that best informs. While predicting news popularity has been well studied, it has not been studied in the context of crowd manipulations. In this paper, we provide some preliminary results to a longer term project on crowd and platform manipulations of news and news popularity. In particular, we choose to study known features for predicting news popularity and how those features may change on reddit.com, a social platform used commonly for news aggregation. Along with this, we explore ways in which users can alter the perception of news through changing the title of an article. We find that news on reddit is predictable using previously studied sentiment and content features and that posts with titles changed by reddit users tend to be more popular than posts with the original article title.Comment: Published at The 2nd International Workshop on News and Public Opinion at ICWSM 201

Extending emission line Doppler tomography ; mapping modulated line flux

Emission line Doppler tomography is a powerful tool that resolves the accretion flow in binaries on micro-arcsecond scales using time-resolved spectroscopy. I present an extension to Doppler tomography that relaxes one of its fundamental axioms and permits the mapping of time-dependent emission sources. Significant variability on the orbital period is a common characteristic of the emission sources that are observed in the accretion flows of cataclysmic variables and X-ray binaries. Modulation Doppler tomography maps sources varying harmonically as a function of the orbital period through the simultaneous reconstruction of three Doppler tomograms. One image describes the average flux distribution like in standard tomography, while the two additional images describe the variable component in terms of its sine and cosine amplitudes. I describe the implementation of such an extension in the form of the maximum entropy based fitting code MODMAP. Test reconstructions of synthetic data illustrate that the technique is robust and well constrained. Artifact free reconstructions of complex emission distributions can be achieved under a wide range of signal to noise levels. An application of the technique is illustrated by mapping the orbital modulations of the asymmetric accretion disc emission in the dwarf nova IP Pegasi.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures; accepted for publication in MNRA

Different Spirals of Sameness: A Study of Content Sharing in Mainstream and Alternative Media

In this paper, we analyze content sharing between news sources in the alternative and mainstream media using a dataset of 713K articles and 194 sources. We find that content sharing happens in tightly formed communities, and these communities represent relatively homogeneous portions of the media landscape. Through a mix-method analysis, we find several primary content sharing behaviors. First, we find that the vast majority of shared articles are only shared with similar news sources (i.e. same community). Second, we find that despite these echo-chambers of sharing, specific sources, such as The Drudge Report, mix content from both mainstream and conspiracy communities. Third, we show that while these differing communities do not always share news articles, they do report on the same events, but often with competing and counter-narratives. Overall, we find that the news is homogeneous within communities and diverse in between, creating different spirals of sameness.Comment: Published at ICWSM 201

NELA-GT-2018: A Large Multi-Labelled News Dataset for The Study of Misinformation in News Articles

In this paper, we present a dataset of 713k articles collected between 02/2018-11/2018. These articles are collected directly from 194 news and media outlets including mainstream, hyper-partisan, and conspiracy sources. We incorporate ground truth ratings of the sources from 8 different assessment sites covering multiple dimensions of veracity, including reliability, bias, transparency, adherence to journalistic standards, and consumer trust. The NELA-GT-2018 dataset can be found at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/ULHLCB.Comment: Published at ICWSM 201