TY - GEN
T1 - What can software tell us about media coverage and public opinion? An analysis of political news posts and audience comments on facebook by computerised method
AU - SONG, Celine
AU - ZHANG, Yin
N1 - Funding Information:
Acknowledgment. We gratefully acknowledge the Research Grants Committee of Hong Kong for providing a generous research grant (HKBU 12632816) for a larger project on which this article is based.
PY - 2017
Y1 - 2017
N2 - In this exploratory study, we applied an automated linguistic analysis method (TextMind) to a social movement context by comparing a sample set of online news posts (N1 = 13,434) with audience comments to the posts (N2 = 1,998,095) on Facebook. The findings of this study revealed that there were, in fact, linguistic differences between the news posts by news media outlets and their corresponding audience comments. TextMind is able to detect such linguistic differences and their changes over time. Comparative findings suggest: (1) The linguistic choices of news reporting are affected by news media’s (or journalists’) political, ideological, and market orientations. (2) The language used by traditional newspapers is not necessarily more conservative or moderate in emotion than their online competitors. (3) Linguistic choices in news posts would change over periods of time. However, (4) the language patterns of news posts did not directly affect linguistic choices of audiences in opinion expression, which remained relatively consistent.
AB - In this exploratory study, we applied an automated linguistic analysis method (TextMind) to a social movement context by comparing a sample set of online news posts (N1 = 13,434) with audience comments to the posts (N2 = 1,998,095) on Facebook. The findings of this study revealed that there were, in fact, linguistic differences between the news posts by news media outlets and their corresponding audience comments. TextMind is able to detect such linguistic differences and their changes over time. Comparative findings suggest: (1) The linguistic choices of news reporting are affected by news media’s (or journalists’) political, ideological, and market orientations. (2) The language used by traditional newspapers is not necessarily more conservative or moderate in emotion than their online competitors. (3) Linguistic choices in news posts would change over periods of time. However, (4) the language patterns of news posts did not directly affect linguistic choices of audiences in opinion expression, which remained relatively consistent.
KW - Automated linguistic analysis
KW - Facebook
KW - Media coverage
KW - Public opinion
KW - TextMind
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85029474499&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-319-67256-4_18
DO - 10.1007/978-3-319-67256-4_18
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85029474499
SN - 9783319672557
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 230
EP - 241
BT - Social Informatics - 9th International Conference, SocInfo 2017, Proceedings
A2 - Ciampaglia, Giovanni Luca
A2 - Yasseri, Taha
A2 - Mashhadi, Afra
PB - Springer Verlag
T2 - 9th International Conference on Social Informatics, SocInfo 2017
Y2 - 13 September 2017 through 15 September 2017
ER -