Search

This paper explores the relationship between news media sentiment and spillover effects in the cryptocurrency market. By employing a time-varying parameter vector autoregressive model, we initially develop measures of spillover specific to individual cryptocurrencies. Subsequently, we employ unique data on cryptocurrency-specific sentiment to assess its impact on these spillover measures using panel fixed effects regression analysis. Our findings indicate that news media sentiment plays a significant role in explaining the spillover dynamics within the cryptocurrency market. Unlike traditional assets, it appears that only positive sentiment affects the spillovers among cryptocurrencies, suggesting an asymmetric effect. Taking into account various characteristics of cryptocurrencies, we find that sentiment's impact on spillover is more pronounced in community-based coins than in those driven by firms. An examination of news content suggests that sentiment pertaining to emotional and risk aspects of cryptocurrencies predominantly influences these spillovers. Additionally, a comparative analysis of sentiment derived from social media and traditional news sources reveals a stronger influence of the former on spillover effects. Through extensive robustness checks, our research consistently affirms the pivotal role of sentiment in driving spillovers among cryptocurrency returns, underlining the importance of sentiment analysis in understanding the dynamics of the cryptocurrency market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Wikipedia's inclusive editorial policy permits unrestricted participation, enabling individuals to contribute and disseminate their expertise while drawing upon a multitude of external sources. News media outlets constitute nearly one-third of all citations within Wikipedia. However, embracing such a radically open approach also poses the challenge of the potential introduction of biased content or viewpoints into Wikipedia. The authors conduct an investigation into the integrity of knowledge within Wikipedia, focusing on the dimensions of source political polarization and trustworthiness. Specifically, the authors delve into the conceivable presence of political polarization within the news media citations on Wikipedia, identify the factors that may influence such polarization within the Wikipedia ecosystem and scrutinize the correlation between political polarization in news media sources and the factual reliability of Wikipedia's content. Design/methodology/approach: The authors conduct a descriptive and regression analysis, relying on Wikipedia Citations, a large-scale open dataset of nearly 30 million citations from English Wikipedia. Additionally, this dataset has been augmented with information obtained from the Media Bias Monitor (MBM) and the Media Bias Fact Check (MBFC). Findings: The authors find a moderate yet significant liberal bias in the choice of news media sources across Wikipedia. Furthermore, the authors show that this effect persists when accounting for the factual reliability of the news media. Originality/value: The results contribute to Wikipedia's knowledge integrity agenda in suggesting that a systematic effort would help to better map potential biases in Wikipedia and find means to strengthen its neutral point of view policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the question of how the recent political context of Brazil shapes violations of various kinds against Quilombola communities in Brazil. Using data from online news sources, we track violations from 2016 to 2020 related to land disputes, physical attacks and threats, and environmental issues. We show that, despite the legal rights accorded to these communities since the 1988 constitutional reform and subsequent processes of democratisation, vested interests in the agricultural lobby and a later authoritarian turn, especially after 2016, led to a dismantling of social and economic policies for Quilombos. The violations suffered by these communities result from the denial of their collective identities as constitutional subjects and the non-recognition of their dignity, which are the product of historical processes of inferiorisation that have treated some people as non-subjects or not eligible to bear rights, based on colonial classifications but still present in the dominant society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conspiracy theories (CTs) have thrived during the COVID-19 pandemic and continue to spread on social media despite attempts at fact-checking. The isolation and fear associated with this pandemic likely contributed to the generation and spread of these theories. Another possible factor is the high rate of Twitter users linking to off-platform alternative news sources through URL sharing (Moffitt et al. 2021). In this paper, we compare URLs and their parent domains linked in CT and non-CT tweets. First, we searched the parent domains of URLs shared in conspiracy theory and non-conspiracy theory classified tweets for the presence of Google tracking codes. We then constructed meta-networks linking domains, tracking codes, and Twitter users to find connections between domains and evidence of an eco-system that may have contributed to the cultivation and spread of conspiracy theories during the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The shift in reliance from broadcast to online news sources has called into question the continued relevance and applicability of conventional frame building practices and frame setting processes in the new media environment. Findings from a 2 (frame direction: same vs different) × 2 (frame emphasis: environment vs health) × 2 (popularity cues: high vs low) between-subjects experiment (N = 326) showed that user comments serve an egalitarian function by enabling laypeople to participate in the construction and dissemination of frames for a novel risk issue, cultured meat. Interestingly, the congruence between elite and lay perspectives was found to be more influential than the specific arguments put forth by different sources in influencing attitudes and behavioral intentions. Issue importance moderated the relationship between frame direction and framing outcomes while perceived source credibility mediated it. Suggestions to safeguard the democratic process and improve online science communication are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses investigative journalism as an ecosystem. It aims to reconstruct the "food chains" of investigative journalism by identifying the origin of investigative stories. Based on a triangulated analysis of a nine-month sample of news content in French-speaking Switzerland, systematic research in news databases, and 23 in-depth interviews with Swiss investigative journalists, it proposes three main characteristics of the Swiss investigative ecosystem: (1) it is mainly reactive; (2) it functions at two speeds; and (3) it is self-feeding. It also shows that investigative journalists view the reactiveness of the ecosystem as a lesser evil that allows them to cope with the pressures constraining their daily practice. Furthermore, while investigative journalists devalue ordinary journalism in general, they see it as a rich source of story leads. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: A key approach to fostering more sustainable food systems involves shifting dietary patterns towards increased plant-based eating. However, plant-based eating remains low among Canadians. The objective of this research was therefore to explore public perceptions of plant-based eating in a Canadian context. Methods: A qualitative design was used to analyze social media comments posted on Canadian news source Facebook articles between January 16th, 2019 - July 16th, 2020. Investigating perceptions of plant-based eating on social media may capture a broader sample of the population than can be captured using other qualitative methods. Template analysis, a type of codebook thematic analysis, was used to generate themes and subthemes using NVivo software. Results: Nine articles were selected for inclusion and a total of n = 4,918 comments were collected. Five themes and 19 subthemes related to plantbased eating were generated and presented with quotations. Themes included: (1) The ethics of food; (2) The affordability and accessibility of food; (3) Distrust of food system stakeholders; (4) Beliefs related to dietary behavior, health, and the environment; and (5) Sensory aspects of plantbased proteins. Discussion: Findings suggest that addressing food affordability and accessibility, increasing public food literacy, using non-judgmental approaches, and increasing food system transparency and communication may be strategies to foster plant-based eating. Results of this study provide insight for the development of more effective public health messaging about plant-based eating and help inform future research and interventions to address barriers related to plant-based eating and promote consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the current post-truth era, the ability to assess the reliability of information is an essential citizenship attribute. With nearly half of the present internet traffic estimated to be generated by bots, and misinformation being regularly weaponised by numerous parties for economic or political gain, it is imperative that citizens are equipped with the tools to discriminate facts from fiction, particularly for health- and science-related matters. The present study reports the results of a survey (n = 776) carried out to evaluate susceptibility to scientific misinformation and perception of news source reliability amongst students in an English secondary school. Two distinct scores were developed in order to differentially measure susceptibility to disinformation (i.e. deliberately false information) and unintentional misinformation (i.e. getting the facts wrong). Non-parametric analysis indicated that students' misinformation (as measured by both scores) decreased significantly over the course of the 5 years of secondary education. Interestingly, the adolescents who took part in the survey exhibited considerably lower belief in common science-based conspiracy theories than the levels previously reported among British adults. Students indicated teachers as their most frequent choice of scientific news. While social media were also indicated as common news sources, students expressed awareness of the unreliability of the content available on social media. Analysis of the open answers indicated that students considered BBC as the most trustworthy source of scientific information, and TikTok as the least trustworthy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing reliance on social media as a source of news, particularly among adolescents, raises important questions for democracy regarding the potential of these platforms to promote engagement with politics. This study sought to examine adolescents' affective (emotions, feelings), behavioural (actions and issue-specific interest), and cognitive (issue-specific knowledge) responses to political news on Instagram Stories. We conducted a field experiment among adolescents in the Netherlands (N = 149). We exposed respondents for seven days to political news items from fictive news organizations. Respondents received either (i) Stories with a link to a news item or (ii) Stories with a link to a news item and interactive feedback features (i.e., polls, quiz stickers, and emoji sliders). The results showed no significant differences in affective, behavioural, and cognitive responses between adolescents who have been exposed to Instagram Stories with high interactivity compared to those who received a link to a news item, indicating that interactivity had no effect on these responses. The results indicate that political interest increased for all respondents throughout the experiment—irrespective of the interactivity of the Instagram Stories. This possibly indicates that exposure to political news through Instagram Stories fosters engagement with politics and current events among adolescents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a first analysis of representation in the African press of the fast-emerging amalgamation of online financial services popularized under the label 'Fintech'. Authors conducted content analysis of selected African newspapers, deploying the concept of framing to examine how the Fintech story is communicated to news readers in Africa. Authors identified nine frequently apparent tropes in a sample of Fintech news and used these tropes to reveal dominant themes in news coverage. The sample of 386 pieces was drawn from multiple African news sources published between 2016 and 2021, a period characterized by rapid uptake of Fintech across the continent and by a global pandemic. Findings suggests that the Fintech story in African newspapers is a predominantly positive, celebratory, and enabling narrative offering little critical reporting. News media examined demonstrate collaboration with the local/transnational finance sector to present a vision of progressive modernity and to reinforce afro-optimism and a techno-utopian discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have long argued that incidental news exposure (INE) is a potentially valuable way citizens gain political information and learn about current affairs. Yet growing scholarship on news avoidance suggests many people still manage to consume little news, and algorithmic curation may decrease the likelihood that they will be exposed to it incidentally. In this article, we put the literatures on INE, news avoidance, and political talk into dialogue with one another. Then, by inductively analyzing over a hundred in-depth interviews conducted from 2016 to 2020 with news avoiders in the UK, Spain, and the United States, we explore how they encounter news incidentally and to what extent they feel the news is accessible and available to them. Our audience-centric approach highlights that interviewees often did not make a clear distinction between direct encounters with professional news ("firsthand news") and discussions of news ("secondhand news"), especially online. When they did make a distinction, the latter was often more salient for them. We also find that just as news consumers have repertoires of news sources on which they habitually rely, news avoiders have repertoires of sources for incidental exposure to news to stay informed about major events and anything that might affect them directly. And yet, those repertoires catch only the biggest and most sensational stories of the day and do little to help them contextualize or understand the news they encounter, contributing to their sense that news is neither entirely absent nor ambient in the way scholars have theorized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contemporary society, the increased reliance on social media as a vital news source has facilitated the spread of disinformation that has potential polarising effects. Disinformation, false information deliberately crafted to deceive recipients, has escalated to the extent that it is now acknowledged as a significant cybersecurity concern. To proactively tackle this issue, and minimise the risk of negative outcomes associated with disinformation, this research presents a typology of disinformation intentionality and impact (DII) to understand the intentionality and impact of disinformation threats. The typology draws upon information manipulation theory and risk management principles to evaluate the potential impact of disinformation campaigns with respect to their virality and polarising impact. The intentionality of disinformation spread is related to its believability among susceptible consumers, who are likely to propagate the disinformation to others if they assess it to be believable. Based on the dimensions of intentionality and impact, the DII typology can be used to categorise disinformation threats and identify strategies to mitigate its risk. To illustrate its utility for evaluating the risk posted by disinformation campaigns, the DII typology is applied to a case study. We propose risk mitigation strategies as well as recommendations for addressing disinformation campaigns spread through social media platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media platforms are increasingly used during disasters. In the United States, users often consider these platforms to be reliable news sources and they believe first responders will see what they publicly post. While having ways to request help during disasters might save lives, this information is difficult to find because non-relevant content on social media completely overshadows content reflective of who needs help. To resolve this issue, we develop a framework for classifying hurricane-related images that have been human-annotated. Our approach uses transfer learning and classifies each image using the VGG-16 convolutional neural network and multi-layer perceptron classifiers according to the urgency, relevance, and time period, in addition to the presence of damage and relief motifs. We find that our framework not only successfully functions as an accurate method for hurricane-related image classification but also that real-time classification of social media images using a small training set is possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The current study analyzed articles shared on Facebook between 2019 and 2021 that discuss the HPV vaccine. Results address a gap in knowledge about the persuasive strategies used in HPV vaccine discourse on Facebook. Methods: Using Buzzsumo.com, we collected 138 articles, shared on Facebook between 2019 and 2021, with the highest "engagement scores," or total number of reactions, comments, and shares. Using a content analysis methodology, three independent coders were trained in using the study codebook, achieved acceptable inter-rater reliability (Krippendorf's alpha = 0.811), and coded each article in Atlas.ti. Results: Seventy-two articles had a positive valence toward the HPV vaccine, 48 had a negative valence, and 18 were mixed-valence or neutral. Pro-vaccine articles presented a variety of evidence types in support of benefits of HPV vaccination. Pro-vaccine articles primarily originated from national and local news sources. Anti-vaccine articles combined presentation of evidence with persuasive arguments and strategies, such as mistrust of institutions, fear appeals, ideological appeals, presenting a high number of arguments or detail, and minimizing the severity of HPV. Three sources were responsible for producing 62.5% of all anti-vaccine articles in the dataset. Mixed-valence or neutral articles mixed cancer prevention discourse with ideological appeals about protecting parental rights, and were mostly produced by local news outlets. Conclusion: The results of this study can help health communicators anticipate the types of discourses that vaccine-hesitant parents may have encountered online. Implications and suggestions for practice are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper demonstrates how artificial-intelligence language analysis can inform understanding of human–nature relationships and other social phenomena. We demonstrate three techniques by investigating relationships within the popular word2vec word embedding, which is trained on a sample from over 50,000 worldwide news sources. Our first technique investigates what theory-generated analogies are most similar to nature:people. The resource:user analogy is most similar, followed by the playground:child and gift:receiver analogies. Our second technique explores whether nature-related words are affiliated with words that denote race, class, or gender. Nature words tend slightly toward associations with femininity and wealth. Our third technique demonstrates how the relationship between nature and wellbeing compares to other concepts' relationships to wellbeing—e.g., spirituality–wellbeing, social relations–wellbeing. Nature is more semantically connected to wellbeing than money, social relations, and multiple other wellbeing correlates. Findings are consistent with previous social science and humanities research on human-nature relationships, but do not duplicate them exactly; our results thus offer insight into dominant trends and prevalence of associations. Our analysis also offers a model for using word embeddings to investigate a wide variety of topics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do people in the world's largest democracy consume news online? In this paper, I aim to answer this question by conducting a quantitative assessment of the online news consumption behavior of a large sample of Indian internet users (N≈50,000) over a period of 45 months. In doing so, I contribute to theoretical debates about global news media use, by systematically appraising the prominence and trends in audience share of different types of news sources, thereby shedding light on the digital news consumption landscape of a crucial, but understudied context. Theoretically, I engage with the displacement-complementarity hypothesis and find no evidence that digital-born media have contested the hegemony of legacy media in India online. Next, I investigate the regional-national media divide and find that regional, vernacular media have suffered significant declines in their audience shares over time. This begs the question whether the notion of 'polycentrism' – the idea that the Indian media environment is comprised of national and regional media of equivalent weight – is at all applicable online as it is offline. These findings also run counter to claims of 'internet vernacularization' that have been touted in the past. Finally, I propose the concept of audience mobility, and use it to identify qualitatively distinct dynamics in how vernacular audiences in India have migrated to national vis-à-vis international outlets. The findings and their implications are discussed in light of contemporary changes in Indian society that is characterized by rapid digitization and increasing literacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Performing two studies, we explore the intermedia attribute agenda-setting effects between the U.S. mainstream newspapers and Twitter. Leveraging computational methodologies, Study 1 analyzes 3,541 newspaper articles and over 1.06 million tweets about the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement, illustrating asymmetrical reciprocity of substantive attributes and mutual independency of affective attributes between both outlets. Study 2 performs in-depth interviews with 16 American journalists, showing that journalists increasingly see Twitter as a news source hub, a self-promotion platform, and a prism of distorted public sentiments. The juxtaposition of both studies revealed the paradigm and driving forces of the intermedia agenda flow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Match day revenue is still an essential source of income for many professional sports clubs worldwide. This paper studies the determinants of ticket pricing in the English Premier League and examines whether and to what extent stadium goers pay a premium for sporting success and spending by clubs in the players' labour market. We estimate regression models for the cheapest and most expensive tickets of clubs playing in the English Premier League for the five seasons between 2014/15 and 2018/19 inclusive. Our study shows that ticket prices are driven by several variables including the opponent and local derbies. The impact of team performance is asymmetric affecting only the most expensive tickets. Capacity utilisation and total labour cost impact the prices of both types of tickets. This research provides insights for both leagues and individual clubs. For example, the findings can be used as a benchmark to assess the magnitude of price increases that the market may be willing to bear. Additionally, clubs can explore the extent to which greater revenues can be extracted from different types of consumers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates news frames used by mainstream news media in the United States to portray the 2020 meatpacking crisis. By integrating framing and animal standpoint theory, it reveals the mechanisms that perpetuate social ignorance about daily practices within the meat industry, particularly those that exclude the perspectives of farmed animals. Through an engagement with intersectional ecofeminism and Critical Animal and Media Studies (CAMS), the investigation probes the cyclical patterns of violence inflicted upon farmed animals in the meat industry as portrayed by news outlets, a phenomenon that simultaneously impacts marginalized human communities. The inclusion of farmed animals as news sources in journalism is discussed as a prescriptive approach to remedy social ignorance on animal agriculture news. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study is to develop a framework for detecting fake news that integrates semantic analysis with a source credibility algorithm, aiming to improve precision in detecting fake news. The proposed system utilizes semantic analysis, named entity recognition (NER), and a newly proposed source credibility algorithm as its methods. The system under consideration is assessed using the Information Security and Object Technology Research Lab (ISOT) dataset, which comprises news stories. The proposed system is evaluated using metrics such as accuracy and precision. The obtained scores are compared with the scores of baseline models. The proposed approach achieves an accuracy of 99.56%, demonstrating near precision, recall, and F1 scores across news categories. Comparative studies indicate that this method surpasses existing fake news detection tools that rely on content-based filtering techniques. The results show that adding the source credibility assessment algorithm to semantic analysis and NER has improved news detection systems, making them much more accurate and reliable. The results highlight the importance of using natural language processing (NLP) techniques and credibility analysis of news sources in efforts to combat misinformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the role of local media in fostering a sense of community belonging among readers in the Ecuadorian context, focusing on how geographical coverage, news sources, and covered themes reinforce community identity. Through content analysis of 17 local media outlets and 6356 news pieces, we investigate how these elements cohesively contribute to the construction of an interconnected community. The findings indicate that predominantly local and regional coverage, along with reliance on primary sources within the community and the prevalence of topics related to politics, sports, and culture, play pivotal roles in creating a shared community fabric. By contextualizing the importance of "glocalization" in journalism, the study demonstrates how local media act as a mirror to community realities and aspirations, promoting a sense of intersubjectivity, adaptability, and civic engagement. This work underscores the critical importance of local media in representing the diversity of reality, facilitating civic participation, and strengthening the social fabric within the local context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Nigerian media have, over the years, moved back and forth via all manners of experience of leadership, from military to democratic, until they finally settled into the present democratic governance. Experience from previous regimes exposed them to the vagaries of power and how to cope with them. These traditional news media, newspapers/magazines, radio, and television, were then the major and authentic news sources for Nigerians. The coming of the internet with its social media handles threw the journalists of these media into confusion as the citizens have taken the reigns of news/information peddling from under them, turning them into agents of confirmation and authenticity of information. Ironically, these traditional media, television, radio, and print, have adjusted to online media streaming, thus liberating themselves from the vagaries of temporal and spatial limitedness. Deploying a survey method (opinion poll, OPL) and relying on a purposive sampling technique, the authors purposively selected WhatsApp group platforms (WGP) as the most suitable of the new/social media with access to all manners of news sources. These were used to interrogate how online media/information/news streaming has taken the audience away from traditional media by being on the 'spot' at all hours with their avalanche of "Breaking News". The findings revealed that audiences currently resort to traditional media to confirm the authenticity of news and information carried online in a sort-of-when-in-doubt-watch-the television manner or listen to radio or read the newspapers/magazines. It concludes that online news streaming has become the coveted bride of present-day information and news seekers, albeit an unreliable one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Local journalism is a pillar of democratic societies, and its role becomes more critical during crises. But despite its critical importance, local news has faced immense challenges that jeopardize its sustainability in the U.S. This study examines the Colorado media ecology by comparing local news sources across four different counties during Summer 2020 and exploring the factors behind similarities and differences in coverage. Building on Napoli et al.'s (2017) framework to assessing the health of local news, the study uses content analysis to examine original, local reporting and coverage of critical information needs as well as type of framing in over 600 online stories appearing on the home pages of all news sources in the four counties. The findings reveal that the Colorado journalism ecosystem post-Covid outpaces U.S. local news in quality in the pre-Covid era yet aligns with disturbing trends pointing to inequities and disparities. In other words, rural, poorer, and more racially and ethnically diverse Colorado communities tend to have weaker news ecosystems and are more likely to become news deserts. The study also introduces thematic coverage as a necessary dimension to add to journalism quality assessment frameworks and discusses several approaches to salvage local news. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite much research on the media coverage of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), the specific language and ideological underpinnings used in this discourse have received little attention. This study compares the discourse surrounding the GERD construction in Egyptian and Ethiopian news sources to identify variations in word choice and underlying biases. Using critical discourse analysis (CDA), the study analyzes two online English news corpora, totalling over a million words across 2655 articles. The analysis involves identifying statistically salient keywords in each corpus and examining their context through a contrastive collocation analysis. The study investigates the data in light of Fairclough's three-dimensional framework, which considers the text, discourse practice, and social practice, and applies van Dijk's concept of the ideological square to explore patterns of self-positive and other-negative representation. The findings reveal distinct patterns of bias in the news coverage from both countries. Egyptian news outlets often frame the GERD project as a source of crisis, depicting Ethiopia as violating international law and exacerbating political tensions. In contrast, Ethiopian news sources tend to portray Egypt as dismissive of Ethiopia's development rights and as monopolizing the Nile's resources. These discursive strategies reflect a broader trend of media bias, where lexical choices and framing techniques align with national interests and diplomatic stances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Internet and social media have transformed the information landscape, democratizing content access and production. While making information easily accessible, these platforms can also act as channels for spreading misinformation, posing crucial societal challenges. To address this, understanding news consumption patterns and unraveling the complexities of the online information environment are essential. Previous studies highlight polarization and misinformation in online discussions, but many focus on specific topics or contexts, often overlooking comprehensive cross-country and cross-topic analyses. However, the dynamics of debates, misinformation prevalence, and the efficacy of countermeasures are intrinsically tied to socio-cultural contexts. This work aims to bridge this gap by exploring information consumption patterns across four European countries over three years. Analyzing the Twitter activity of news outlets in France, Germany, Italy, and the UK, this study seeks to shed light on how topics of European significance resonate across these nations and the role played by misinformation sources. The results spotlight that while reliable sources predominantly shape the information landscape, unreliable content persists across all countries and topics. Though most users favor trustworthy sources, a small percentage predominantly consumes content from questionable sources, with even fewer maintaining a mixed information diet. The cross-country comparison unravels disparities in audience overlap among news sources, the prevalence of misinformation, and the proportion of users relying on questionable sources. Such distinctions surface not only across countries but also within various topics. These insights underscore the pressing need for tailored studies, crucial in designing targeted and effective countermeasures against misinformation and extreme polarization in the digital space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does the way journalists report on electoral fraud affect Americans' support for voter ID laws? Drawing on an original survey experiment, we show that exposure to reporting on voter fraud that contains weight-of-evidence information and factual corrections reduces support for voter ID laws. The results of a causal mediation analysis show that this effect is mediated by beliefs about the severity of voter fraud. Further, we find that news source attribution does not moderate this effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the relationship between political ideology and integrative complexity in terms of COVID-19 news coverage. Briefly, integrative complexity is a psycholinguistic construct that examines cognitive structure. Based on a sample of COVID-19 news articles sourced from liberal, moderate, and conservative news networks, the results show liberal and moderate networks displayed higher complexity scores than conservative networks. The results further confirm a complexity pattern seen in previous research — liberals and moderates tend to demonstrate more complex rhetoric than conservatives. Moreover, the conservative networks' lower scores may be explained by the predominance of misinformation in their coverage of COVID-19. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How often do political elites in the U.S. share low-quality news sources? Are there differences between the parties? While past work has investigated individuals sharing low-quality news sources, there are few large-scale analyses of the quality of information shared by political elites. As individuals rely on elite cues to inform their decision-making, officials sharing low-quality sites may increase polarization while providing legitimacy to low-quality outlets. We fill this gap by collecting more than 300,000 links shared on Facebook by U.S. members of Congress and measuring how often each party shares information from known low-quality news sources. We find that members of Congress share more links to low-quality sites than the public, that Republican members share considerably more than Democrats, and that this gap has increased over time. Finally, we investigate the potential mechanisms underlying this partisan gap and find that only Republicans receive increased engagement when sharing low- quality sites, suggesting asymmetric incentives to share low-quality news sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Index.Comunicación is the property of Index.comunicacion and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Index.Comunicación is the property of Index.comunicacion and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

We study transitions of brands in an emerging market to develop a novel framework for understanding brand evolution specific to emerging markets. We prepare and analyse case studies of ten Indian brands based on a range of secondary sources including news articles, company websites, manager interviews, and advertisements. The framework that we develop is based on two dimensions that are particularly critical to emerging markets – the role of the government and the market orientation of the firm – leading to the identification of four transitionary patterns. By locating the ten selected brands on the framework, we highlight the distinct nature of brand transitions in emerging markets. In contrast to prior work on brand evolution that largely focuses on developed markets, our research provides a differentiated framework applicable for brand transitions in emerging markets. We present managerial implications and an agenda for future research [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the differences and similarities between the news frames used by online mainstream media in Vietnam and Australia when reporting COVID-19 in the early waves of the pandemic. The project uses constant comparative analysis to interrogate data gathered from two online news sources: ABC Online (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) in Australia, and Tuoi Tre Online in Vietnam. The article concludes that the Australian Broadcasting Corporation coverage focuses more on social, political and economic factors than is the case with Tuoi Tre Online, which foregrounds civic responsibility in response to the COVID-19 epidemic. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation highlights how COVID-19 amplifies the long-term consequences of social disadvantage while Tuoi Tre Online, in contrast, emphasises the short-term, acute community impacts of outbreaks, given that these require rapid identification and control. It is argued that differences between the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's and Tuoi Tre Online's framings of the pandemic reflect national differences in governance of disasters. Tuoi Tre Online perceives healthy citizenry as soldiers, and constructs the vulnerable and infected as challenges to the biological safety of the whole: the majority social collective. In contrast, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation frames vulnerable and infected individuals as important, focussing on their rights and on the responsibilities of mainstream society towards those who are at risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automated stance detection and related machine learning methods can provide useful insights for media monitoring and academic research. Many of these approaches require annotated training datasets, which limits their applicability for languages where these may not be readily available. This paper explores the applicability of large language models for automated stance detection in a challenging scenario, involving a morphologically complex, lower-resource language, and a socio-culturally complex topic, immigration. If the approach works in this case, it can be expected to perform as well or better in less demanding scenarios. We annotate a large set of pro- and anti-immigration examples to train and compare the performance of multiple language models. We also probe the usability of GPT-3.5 (that powers ChatGPT) as an instructable zero-shot classifier for the same task. The supervised models achieve acceptable performance, but GPT-3.5 yields similar accuracy. As the latter does not require tuning with annotated data, it constitutes a potentially simpler and cheaper alternative for text classification tasks, including in lower-resource languages. We further use the best-performing supervised model to investigate diachronic trends over seven years in two corpora of Estonian mainstream and right-wing populist news sources, demonstrating the applicability of automated stance detection for news analytics and media monitoring settings even in lower-resource scenarios, and discuss correspondences between stance changes and real-world events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is becoming harder to tell rumors from non-rumors as social media becomes a key news source, which invites malicious manipulation that could do harm to the public's health or cause financial loss. When faced with situations when the session structure of comment sections is deliberately disrupted, traditional models do not handle them adequately. In order to do this, we provide a novel rumor detection architecture that combines dual comparison learning, adversarial training, and attention filters. We suggest the attention filter module to achieve the filtering of some dangerous comments as well as the filtering of some useless comments, allowing the nodes to enter the GAT graph neural network with greater structural information. The adversarial training module (ADV) simulates the occurrence of malicious comments through perturbation, giving the comments some defense against malicious comments. It also serves as a hard negative sample to aid double contrast learning (DCL), which aims to learn the differences between various comments, and incorporates the final loss in the form of a loss function to strengthen the model. According to experimental findings, our AGAD (Attention Graph Adversarial Dual Contrast Learning) model outperforms other cutting-edge algorithms on a number of rumor detection tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/icezhangGG/AGAD.git. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Typhoon disasters undergo a complex evolutionary process influenced by temporal changes, and investigating this process constitutes the central focus of geographical research. As a key node within the typhoon disaster process, the state serves as the foundation for gauging the dynamics of the disaster. The majority of current approaches to disaster information extraction rely on event extraction methods to acquire fundamental elements, including disaster-causing factors, disaster-bearing bodies, disaster-pregnant environment and the extent of damage. Due to the dispersion of various disaster information and the diversity of time and space, it is a challenge for supporting the analysis of the typhoon disaster process. In this paper, a typhoon disaster state information extraction (TDSIE) method for Chinese texts is proposed, which aims to facilitate the systematic integration of fragmented typhoon disaster information. First, the integration of part-of-speech tagging with spatio-temporal information extraction is employed to achieve the tagging of typhoon disaster texts. Second, within the framework of spatio-temporal semantic units, the typhoon disaster semantic vector is constructed to facilitate the identification of information elements of typhoon disaster states. Third, co-referential state information fusion is performed based on spatio-temporal cues. Experimental analysis, conducted using online news as the data source, reveals that the TDSIE achieves precision and recall rates consistently surpassing 85%. The typhoon disaster state information derived from the TDSIE allows for the analysis of spatio-temporal patterns, evolutionary characteristics, and activity modes of typhoon disasters across various scales. Therefore, TDSIE serves as valuable support for investigating the inherent process properties of typhoon disasters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the acute need for science journalism in the Arab region, revealing challenges such as dependence on foreign sources for science news. The scarcity of job opportunities and the low priority given to science in newsrooms have also contributed to this issue. Although European donors have offered training, there is a need for more sustainable platforms to encourage the growth of Arab science journalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the dynamic landscape of digital information, the rise of misinformation and fake news presents a pressing challenge. This paper takes a completely new approach to verifying news, inspired by how quantum actors can reach agreement even when they are spatially spread out. We propose a radically new—to the best of our knowledge—algorithm that uses quantum "entanglement" (think of it as a special connection) to help news aggregators "sniff out" bad actors, whether they are other news sources or even fact-checkers trying to spread misinformation. This algorithm does not rely on quantum signatures; it merely uses basic quantum technology which we already have, in particular, special pairs of particles called "EPR pairs" that are much easier to create than other options. More elaborate entangled states are like juggling too many balls—they are difficult to make and slow things down, especially when many players are involved. So, we adhere to Bell states, the simplest form of entanglement, which are easy to generate no matter how many players are involved. This means that our algorithm is faster to set up, works for any number of participants, and is more practical for real-world use. Additionally, as a "bonus point", it finishes in a fixed number of steps, regardless of how many players are involved, making it even more scalable. This new approach may lead to a powerful and efficient way to fight misinformation in the digital age, using the weird and wonderful world of quantum mechanics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the phenomenon of anonymous news channels on Russian Telegram, which have become increasingly popular in recent years. Drawing on 25 self-confrontation interviews, we answer the following questions: Do users trust anonymous news? If not, why do they keep using this information source? How does a restrictive socio-political context influence users' trust in alternative news sources? Our results show that, in Russia, the concept of trust is linked to the normative democratic understanding of journalistic functions. At the same time, many users believe that trust in media is not at all necessary and develop individual strategies to navigate a "chaos of narratives". The paper discusses Telegram's role in shaping trust or distrust in news. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Broadsheet newspapers are an important source of economic news. Using a unique dataset of more than 489,000 articles over the last 20 years, this article asks the question whether newspapers published in Scotland communicate similar economic sentiments as UK‐wide newspapers. The findings show that although Scottish and UK newspapers share a positive correlation, this relationship varies over time. There is evidence of causality running mostly from the United Kingdom to Scotland. The Scottish Referendum 2014 has had an impact on newspaper reporting when there was more uncertainty in the communication. Individual newspapers respond differently during the referendum periods where some newspapers, The Daily Telegraph and Daily Record for instance reacted to the uncertainty rather strongly, whereas local newspapers represented news in a rather surprising positive note. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Large, powerful corporations were formerly solely and exclusively responsible for supplies, manufacturing, and distribution; however, the supply chain has undergone significant transformations over the last half-century. Almost all supply chain processes are currently outsourced, owing to the initiatives of cutting-edge, contemporary businesses. According to a compilation of studies, analysts, and news sources, the level of risk associated with modern supply chains is considerably higher than the majority of supply chain managers believe. Supply chain vulnerabilities continue to pose a substantial obstacle for a great number of organizations. Neglecting to adequately address these risks—encompassing natural disasters, cyber assaults, acts of terrorism, the credit crisis, pandemic scenarios, and war—could result in substantial reductions in metrics such as profitability, productivity, revenue, and competitive advantage. Unresolved concerns persist with respect to the risk assessment of the supply chain. The purpose of this article is to propose a framework for risk evaluation that can be efficiently applied to the evaluation of hazards within the supply chain. This research study significantly enhances the existing knowledge base by offering supply chain managers a pragmatic tool to evaluate their processes, regardless of the mathematical foundations or the variety of variables utilized in risk assessment. The outcomes of multiple aggregation methods are compared using a case study from an automotive EMS production; the conclusions are validated by risk and FMEA specialists from the same factory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a competitive digital environment, news outlets employ attention-gaining strategies, including the portrayal of conflict. Yet such coverage may backfire. Using an experiment comparing exposure to disagreeable or uncivil conflict news, we examine how articles with different types of conflict relate to intended news engagement through the mediating variables of perceived incivility, news source credibility, and/or surveillance emotions and test the moderating effects of conflict avoidance. We find that in textual, digital settings, uncivil conflict news is high risk and low reward: perceived incivility can increase engagement through surveillance emotions but also can decrease engagement directly and through decreased news credibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article novel research on disinformation conducted by the Central European Digital Media Observatory. We have identified Russian disinformation strategies related to the war in Ukraine and established the extent of their penetration in Central European countries. This international comparison shows that thecountries in question are susceptible to Russia-related disinformation efforts to a highly varying degree. Poland is largely immune to narratives about the Ukraine war and the Ukrainian state imposed by official and unofficial actors connected to the Russian authorities and their supporters. On the other hand, Slovak society is relatively receptive to such sentiments, while Czechs are somewhere between these poles. The use of social media as a source of news contributes to disinformation, but the effect is weak. In all three societies there is a strong, significant influence of individuals' degree of education and material situation. Respondents with post-secondary education and those who consider themselves well off are less vulnerable to disinformation, regardless of their media consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For seventy years, gatekeeping theory has described how news sources, news institutions, and audiences impact the way information is distributed and consumed through mass media. But when a Black teenager, Michael Brown, was fatally shot by police in Ferguson, Missouri, citizen accounts of him having his "hands up" quickly spread on social media, forcing journalists to acknowledge both the circumstances of the shooting and the role of social media in shaping the narrative. This historical study of the "recent past" considers how Brown's shooting death served as a "critical incident" that forced journalists to reevaluate long-held practices in the face of citizen journalism on social media. Using textual analysis, this study examines local and national news coverage of the shooting and resulting protests, as well as subsequent investigations over the following weeks and months; it draws on content from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, New York Times, and other outlets, as well as Twitter posts from citizens. The study, which places Ferguson in the historical context of breaking news coverage, finds social media narratives initially impacted the shape of news coverage, but over time journalists ultimately reverted to their traditional reliance on official sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Experts are a favorite source of information in the news media as they have the ability to provide balanced and authoritative comments on important issues. However, two factors cast doubt on the extent to which such experts can actually provide balanced information: conflicts of interest and areas of expertise. In this paper, we analyze the use of expert voices during the COVID pandemic in two Austrian broadsheet papers. Methods: We examine the use of reporting verbs employed to indicate the journalists' stance towards the expert comments as well as the relationship of those comments to the experts' fields of expertise and to any potential conflicts of interest. Results: Our analysis shows that the media uncritically reported experts that had considerable conflicts of interest, while others were permitted to comment on topics far outside their particular fields. Conclusions: In the absence of journalistic scrutiny, distance, and context, both of these practices are likely to have led audiences to take the experts' comments at face value and therefore to have embraced unbalanced information that amplified official narratives, to the exclusion of alternative voices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main purpose of this paper is to emphasize the role of data pre-processing in the sentiment analysis of Twitter data. The paper provides detailed analysis and methods to understand and handle Twitter data for analyzing public views during elections. We argue that in order to accurately assess public opinion towards a political party or leader, there is a need to focus on users' personal tweets rather than tweets from news or media sources. We also argue that emojis, punctuations, stopwords, emphasized words, and some specific regions (Unicode, #, @) inside tweets play a very significant role in analyzing sentiments. In view of this, this paper provides a novel set of pre-processing steps that perform filtering and cleaning of tweets without losing any vital information. For experimentation, a small case study is taken that comprises 258,891 instances related to the 2019 Indian General Election from Twitter using #LoksabhaElection2019. A pre-trained sentiment analysis model called twitter-xlm-roberta-base-sentiment is used to analyze the sentiment of public tweets. Results show that tweets from media sources and the specific regions of tweets inject data bias and affect final sentiment analysis results. We found that out of the collected data, only 40% of tweets were useful for determining public sentiments for election analysis, while the rest were irrelevant media tweets. Also, an increase in negative and neutral sentiment outputs is observed due to the presence of media tweets and the specific regions. Further, explorative analysis analyzes public sentiments towards various political terms inferred using top2vec topic modeling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While many news outlets aim for impartiality, 67% of Americans perceive their news sources as partisan, often presenting only one side of the story. This paper tests whether exposing individuals to news stories their political adversaries focus on can mitigate political polarization. In an experiment involving a real-world political newsletter—sent to participants who had opted to receive news that uncovers media biases—exposure to a specific story about refugee policy led respondents to reassess their positions. This reevaluation changed their stances on the issue and reduced the ideological distinctions they made between Democrats and Republicans. These findings underscore the need for future studies to untangle the specific circumstances where cross-partisan exposure can alter political attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has shown that young people's voices are under- and misrepresented in the news. However, the editorial mechanisms behind this outcome remain largely unexplored. Drawing from the professional frame of media accountability, young people present journalism with a double challenge: to avoid harm while enabling participation. In this paper, we examine editorial mechanisms of including/excluding young people in the news in Sweden and Estonia through an overview of ethical breach cases affecting minors and a set of semi-structured interviews with editors. These investigations are set in the context of digital changes and from the perspectives of children's rights and childhood as a social construct. The interview study revealed that facilitating the freedom of expression might be an editorial ideal, but in practice, minors have limited value as news sources. While editors paid close attention to protective measures for underage interviewees, these measures were sometimes inconsistent and overly protective. Furthermore, the majority of ethical breach cases concerned children who were talked about, rather than with. Therefore, we argue that current editorial interpretations of media accountability limit young people's voices in the news, while still failing to provide an effective remedy for harm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The spread of misinformation poses a threat to the social media ecosystem. Effective countermeasures to mitigate this threat require that social media platforms be able to accurately detect low-credibility accounts even before the content they share can be classified as misinformation. Here we present methods to infer account credibility from information diffusion patterns, in particular leveraging two networks: the reshare network, capturing an account's trust in other accounts, and the bipartite account-source network, capturing an account's trust in media sources. We extend network centrality measures and graph embedding techniques, systematically comparing these algorithms on data from diverse contexts and social media platforms. We demonstrate that both kinds of trust networks provide useful signals for estimating account credibility. Some of the proposed methods yield high accuracy, providing promising solutions to promote the dissemination of reliable information in online communities. Two kinds of homophily emerge from our results: accounts tend to have similar credibility if they reshare each other's content or share content from similar sources. Our methodology invites further investigation into the relationship between accounts and news sources to better characterize misinformation spreaders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During crises, news headlines not only communicate objective information but also express attitudes and emotions towards the reported events through different linguistic markers of evaluation. By analysing Finnish headlines from digital news sources on 16–17 March 2020, in this article we unravel how evaluative parameters, themes, and actors construct evaluative images of Covid-19 in Finnish news media. The results show how themes such as daily lives, health, and restrictive measures are evaluated, for example, through emotivity, mental state, evidentiality, and style. Findings also highlight the variety of different actors, from authorities to ordinary citizens, involved in the headlines. Consequently, three evaluative images emerge: 1) the pandemic that evokes concern and solidarity in the everyday lives of citizens; 2) the pandemic as a challenging health crisis, with the authorities as responsible decision-makers; and 3) the pandemic as a crisis that creates concern and negatively impacts the different functions of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]