Related papers: Media Slant is Contagious
In recent years online social networks have become increasingly prominent in political campaigns and, concurrently, several countries have experienced shock election outcomes. This paper proposes a model that links these two phenomena. In…
Cable TV news reaches millions of U.S. households each day, meaning that decisions about who appears on the news and what stories get covered can profoundly influence public opinion and discourse. We analyze a data set of nearly 24/7 video,…
This paper explains why, despite a marked increase in available political information on cable television and the Internet, citizens' levels of political knowledge have, at best, remained stagnant (Delli Carpini & Keeter, 1996). Since the…
In this paper, we are interested in understanding the interrelationships between mainstream and social media in forming public opinion during mass crises, specifically in regards to how events are framed in the mainstream news and on social…
Democratic opinion-forming may be manipulated if newspapers' alignment to political or economical orientation is ambiguous. Various methods have been developed to better understand newspapers' positioning. Recently, the advent of Large…
Previous research has identified a post-2010 sharp increase of terms used to denounce prejudice (i.e. racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, etc.) in U.S. and U.K. news media content. Here, we extend previous analysis to…
The increasing digitization of political speech has opened the door to studying a new dimension of political behavior using text analysis. This work investigates the value of word-level statistical data from the US Congressional…
Many recent political events, like the 2016 US Presidential elections or the 2018 Brazilian elections have raised the attention of institutions and of the general public on the role of Internet and social media in influencing the outcome of…
Social media has emerged as a significant source of information for people. As agents interact with each other through social media platforms, they create numerous complex social networks. Within these networks, information spread among…
The Facebook Privacy-Protected Full URLs Dataset was released to enable independent, academic research on the impact of Facebook's platform on society while ensuring user privacy. The dataset has been used in several studies to analyze the…
This paper investigates the usage patterns of Facebook among different demographics in the United States, focusing on the consumption of political information and its variability across age, gender, and ethnicity. Employing a novel data…
How political beliefs change in accordance with media exposure is a complicated matter. Some studies have been able to demonstrate that groups with different media diets in the aggregate (e.g., U.S. media consumers ingesting partisan news)…
The spread of information has become faster and wider than ever with the advent of social network platforms. The question raised in this study is whether information dissemination in social networks is random or follows a discernible…
Many democratic societies have become more politically polarized, with the U.S. as the main example. The origins of this phenomenon are still not well-understood and subject to debate. To better understand the mechanisms underlying…
This article relies on information-theoretic measures to examine how events impacted the news for the period 1950-1995. Moreover, we present a method for event characterization in (unstructured) textual sources, offering a taxonomy of…
Information diffusion and virus propagation are fundamental processes taking place in networks. While it is often possible to directly observe when nodes become infected with a virus or adopt the information, observing individual…
Social influence profoundly impacts individual choices and collective behaviors in politics. In this work, driven by the goal of protecting elections from improper influence, we consider the following scenario: an individual, who has vested…
We examine partisan differences in the behavior, communication patterns and social interactions of more than 18,000 politically-active Twitter users to produce evidence that points to changing levels of partisan engagement with the American…
Online social networks provide a medium for citizens to form opinions on different societal issues, and a forum for public discussion. They also expose users to viral content, such as breaking news articles. In this paper, we study the…
Political sectarianism is fueled in part by misperceptions of political opponents: People commonly overestimate the support for extreme policies among members of the other party. Research suggests that correcting partisan misperceptions by…