Related papers: Media Slant is Contagious
The growing political polarization of the American electorate over the last several decades has been widely studied and documented. During the administration of President Donald Trump, charges of "fake news" made social and news media not…
With the growth of online news over the past decade, empirical studies on political discourse and news consumption have focused on the phenomenon of filter bubbles and echo chambers. Yet recently, scholars have revealed limited evidence…
Political polarization appears to be on the rise, as measured by voting behavior, general affect towards opposing partisans and their parties, and contents posted and consumed online. Research over the years has focused on the role of the…
Slanted news coverage strongly affects public opinion. This is especially true for coverage on politics and related issues, where studies have shown that bias in the news may influence elections and other collective decisions. Due to its…
In recent years, scholars have raised concerns on the effects that unreliable news, or "fake news," has on our political sphere, and our democracy as a whole. For example, the propagation of fake news on social media is widely believed to…
US voters shared large volumes of polarizing political news and information in the form of links to content from Russian, WikiLeaks and junk news sources. Was this low quality political information distributed evenly around the country, or…
Traditional media outlets are known to report political news in a biased way, potentially affecting the political beliefs of the audience and even altering their voting behaviors. Many researchers focus on automatically detecting and…
In an era marked by an abundance of news sources, access to information significantly influences public opinion. Notably, the bias of news sources often serves as an indicator of individuals' political leanings. This study explores this…
Local news stations are often considered to be reliable sources of non-politicized information, particularly local concerns that residents care about. Because these stations are trusted news sources, viewers are particularly susceptible to…
The increasing prevalence of political bias in news media calls for greater public awareness of it, as well as robust methods for its detection. While prior work in NLP has primarily focused on the lexical bias captured by linguistic…
Social influence plays an important role in human behavior and decisions. The sources of influence can be generally divided into external, which are independent of social context, or as originating from peers, such as family and friends. An…
Political polls achieve their results by sampling a small number of potential voters rather than the population as a whole. This leads to sampling error which most polling agencies dutifully report. But factors such as nonrepresentative…
Increasing levels of far-right extremist violence have generated public concern about the spread of radicalization in the United States. Previous research suggests that radicalized individuals are destabilized by various environmental (or…
We introduce a socially motivated extension of the voter model in which individual voters are also influenced by two opposing, fixed-opinion news sources. These sources forestall consensus and instead drive the population to a politically…
News outlets are now more than ever incentivized to provide their audience with slanted news, while the intrinsic homophilic nature of online social media may exacerbate polarized opinions. Here, we propose a new dynamic latent space model…
News sharing on digital platforms shapes the digital spaces millions of users navigate. Trace data from these platforms also enables researchers to study online news circulation. In this context, research on the types of news shared by…
Macroeconomic fluctuations and the narratives that shape them form a mutually reinforcing cycle: public discourse can spur behavioural changes leading to economic shifts, which then result in changes in the stories that propagate. We show…
News media is often referred to as the Fourth Estate, a recognition of its political power. New understandings of how media shape political beliefs and influence collective behaviors are urgently needed in an era when public opinion polls…
This paper studies the effects of talk radio, specifically the Rush Limbaugh Show, on electoral outcomes and attitude polarization in the U.S. We propose a novel identification strategy that considers the radio space in each county as a…
Social media has played an important role in shaping political discourse over the last decade. At the same time, it is often perceived to have increased political polarization, thanks to the scale of discussions and their public nature. In…