Related papers: Large-scale Quantitative Evidence of Media Impact …
In this study, we closely look at the use of social media contents as source or reference in the U.S. news media. Specifically, we examine about 60 thousand news articles published within the 5 years period of 2013-2017 by 153 U.S. media…
Objectivity in journalism has long been contested, oscillating between ideals of neutral, fact-based reporting and the inevitability of subjective framing. With the advent of large language models (LLMs), these tensions are now mediated by…
There has been a tremendous rise in the growth of online social networks all over the world in recent times. While some networks like Twitter and Facebook have been well documented, the popular Chinese microblogging social network Sina…
Mining user opinion from Micro-Blogging has been extensively studied on the most popular social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook in the U.S., but few studies have been done on Micro-Blogging websites in other countries (e.g.…
Modeling differential stress expressions in urban and rural regions in China can provide a better understanding of the effects of urbanization on psychological well-being in a country that has rapidly grown economically in the last two…
As scientists we like to think that modern societies and their members base their views, opinions and behaviour on scientific facts. This is not necessarily the case, even though we are all (over-) exposed to information flow through…
In this article, we quantitatively analyze how the term "fake news" is being shaped in news media in recent years. We study the perception and the conceptualization of this term in the traditional media using eight years of data collected…
This research studies the impact of online news on social and economic consumer perceptions through semantic network analysis. Using over 1.8 million online articles on Italian media covering four years, we calculate the semantic importance…
Language encodes societal beliefs about social groups through word patterns. While computational methods like word embeddings enable quantitative analysis of these patterns, studies have primarily examined gradual shifts in Western…
In a stylized voting model, we establish that increasing the share of critical thinkers -- individuals who are aware of the ambivalent nature of a certain issue -- in the population increases the efficiency of surveys (elections) but might…
Public opinion reflects and shapes societal behavior, but the traditional survey-based tools to measure it are limited. We introduce a novel approach to probe media diet models -- language models adapted to online news, TV broadcast, or…
Social interactions influence people's opinions. In some situations, these interactions eventually yield a consensus opinion; in others, they can lead to opinion fragmentation and the formation of different opinion groups in the form of…
Social cognitive theory explains how people learn and acquire knowledge through observing others. Recent years have witnessed the rapid development of large language models (LLMs), which suggests their potential significance as agents in…
Foreign information operations conducted by Russian and Chinese actors exploit the United States' permissive information environment. These campaigns threaten democratic institutions and the broader Westphalian model. Yet, existing…
Mass Media outlets have occupied the central role of the political scenario, and are persuasive in the process of opinion formation of the citizens. In particular, the study of the relationship between Mass Media and behaviour of citizens…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into search services, providing direct answers that can reduce users' reliance on traditional result pages. Yet their factual reliability in non-English web ecosystems remains poorly…
Media coverage has a substantial effect on the public perception of events. Nevertheless, media outlets are often biased. One way to bias news articles is by altering the word choice. The automatic identification of bias by word choice is…
Social networks play a fundamental role in the diffusion of information. However, there are two different ways of how information reaches a person in a network. Information reaches us through connections in our social networks, as well as…
The rise in online misinformation in recent years threatens democracies by distorting authentic public discourse and causing confusion, fear, and even, in extreme cases, violence. There is a need to understand the spread of false content…
Following the outbreak of a global pandemic, online content is filled with hate speech. Donald Trump's ''Chinese Virus'' tweet shifted the blame for the spread of the Covid-19 virus to China and the Chinese people, which triggered a new…