This qualitative study explores instances where someone is accused of being a troll or a bot in newspaper comment sections. Trolls have been known to create a hostile environment in comment sections, ...often motivated by attention seeking and amusement. In recent years, following the Brexit vote and the U.S. presidential election of 2016, trolls have also been accused of actively undermining the Western political climate by using social media to divide political opponents. Furthermore, technological development has led to the possibility of automated software, known as bots, playing a role in online debates. As social media users and participants of online comment sections become more digitally literate, the awareness of trolls and bots will hopefully make people less susceptible to online manipulation. But this awareness could also cause commenters to discredit and delegitimize opposing arguments in comment sections by accusing others of being a troll or a bot, without considering the merits of the argument itself. If this is the case, it constitutes a challenge in creating a democratically valuable debate in comment sections. In this study, comments from three U.S. news sites were sampled and analyzed to investigate how accusations of trolling are made, and how debates are affected by such accusations. The results showed that right-wing commenters were more likely to be accused of trolling, and that these accusations seem to have been motivated by political differences. Accusers would either challenge the suspected troll, critique the effectiveness of the perceived trolling, make fun of the suspected troll, or simply warn other commenters about their presence. Finally, while debates often continued after an accusation of trolling had been made, the accuser and the accused rarely participated further. The results suggest that accusations of trolling do not have any major impact on the debate. It is, however, problematic that such accusations seem to be used as a rhetorical tool to discredit opposing arguments, which could lower the deliberative quality of debates in comment sections.
News-based trading strategies Feuerriegel, Stefan; Prendinger, Helmut
Decision Support Systems,
10/2016, Letnik:
90
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The marvel of markets lies in the fact that dispersed information is instantaneously processed and used to adjust the price of goods, services and assets. Financial markets are particularly efficient ...when it comes to processing information; such information is typically embedded in textual news that is then interpreted by investors. Quite recently, researchers have started to automatically determine news sentiment in order to explain stock price movements. Interestingly, this so-called news sentiment works fairly well in explaining stock returns. In this paper, we design trading strategies that utilize textual news in order to obtain profits on the basis of novel information entering the market. We thus propose approaches for automated decision-making based on supervised and reinforcement learning. Altogether, we demonstrate how news-based data can be incorporated into an investment system.
The purpose of this study is to understand the journalism practice enacted by Moroccan Urban Electronic Newspapers' (UENs) journalists and news media practitioners. This study, therefore, takes ...representative UENs' reporters, journalism intellectuals, and the editorial managers' perspectives on the contribution of these platforms to explore the transformative era of electronic journalism in Morocco. The participants' views regard that the digital era has widened the creation and multiplication of UENs, which has interestingly celebrated freedom of content circulation and audience outreach but engendered chaos through sinking and diluting. Hence, this has led several journalists to demand structural state intervention. As a result, journalism scholars and practitioners warn against deteriorating journalism conditions facilitated to increase practitioners" call for rigid and paternalistic supervision of the field.
The authenticity of public debate is challenged by the emergence of networks of non-genuine users (such as political bots and trolls) employed and maintained by governments to influence public ...opinion. To tackle this issue, researchers have developed algorithms to automatically detect non-genuine users, but it is not clear how to identify relevant content, what features to use and how often to retrain classifiers. Users of online discussion boards who informally flag other users by calling them out as paid trolls provide potential labels of perceived propaganda in real time. Against this background, we test the performance of supervised machine learning models (regularized regression and random forests) to predict discussion board comments perceived as propaganda by users of a major Romanian online newspaper. Results show that precision and recall are relatively high and stable, and re-training the model on new labels does not improve prediction diagnostics. Overall, metadata (particularly a low comment rating) are more predictive of perceived propaganda than textual features. The method can be extended to monitor suspicious activity in other online environments, but the results should not be interpreted as detecting actual propaganda.
This study investigates the representation of the Fridays for Future strikes in the German online newspapers Bild.de, Zeit Online and FAZ.net. Through a qualitative and quantitative content analysis ...over the time period August 2018 to March 2019, eight frames have been identified. Whereas Zeit Online shows a framing towards intergenerational justice, the coverage of FAZ.net and Bild.de strongly adheres to the protest paradigm. The majority of all articles guarantees protesters a voice, but this voice is often reduced to apolitical testimonies and the protesters’ self-agency is undermined through disparagement. German media coverage thus tends to reproduce existing power structures by marginalizing and depoliticizing the political agenda of a system critical protest. Although this framing feeds into the shift of the climate change discourse towards adaptation, the study shows that the idea of climate change as an issue of intergenerational justice and children’s rights has become part of the media’s agenda.
Success of global attempts to limit climate change depends partly upon public support for demands of climate activist groups. We examined the role of social representation and identity processes in ...shaping opposition to climate activism, through a discursive thematic analysis of 628 online comments on 20 MailOnline articles about climate activists. Members of the commenting community propagated representations of climate activists as an immoral and incompetent, low‐value to society, ideological Other. Commenters contrasted negative representations of activists with constructions of their own shared identity as hardworking, moral and competent. These constructions serve to undermine and delegitimize the activist voice, while simultaneously advancing a political project rooted in ideological and class‐based concerns. Future research might explore the possibility of engaging wider support through generating competing representations of activist identity. Our research illustrates the value of jointly focusing on social representations and social identity processes for understanding issue‐based societal polarisation.
This paper addresses responses to news about the imposing of a local lockdown in a UK city. The opposition to the measure shows it to be controversial as does the associated rejection of the grounds ...for taking action against covid more generally, which comes alongside the devaluing of expertise, resistance to public health responses, a proliferation of conspiracy theories and misinformation and the harm that can be caused by focussing on non-adherence to covid measure. The research question for this analysis is therefore: how are arguments about the local lockdown discursively formulated in online discussions? Discursive analysis of online discussions following four newspaper articles identified six arguments used that range from scepticism to conspiratorial: scepticism over (1) the prevalence and; (2) severity of covid; (3) lockdowns generally do not work and (4) the specific city lockdown will not work; (5) lockdowns are overly risk averse; and (6) there are hidden political motives for lockdowns. The discussion shows how both the 'conspiratorial' and non-conspiratorial arguments are potentially harmful from a public health perspective.
The public is concerned about plastic pollution, while clear‐cut scientific evidence for an environmental risk of microplastics is absent. This contrast between incomplete scientific knowledge and ...public risk perception is an interesting case for investigating how “environmental risk” is transformed in science communication. This study examines how microplastics risks are framed in peer‐reviewed publications and online newspaper articles, respectively. It also analyzes if the contents conveyed by the frames used in science and the media are consistent. The results show that most scientific studies (67%) frame microplastics risks as hypothetical or uncertain, while 24% present them as established. In contrast, most media articles reporting on microplastic impacts (93%) imply that risks of microplastics exist and harmful consequences are highly probable. The creation of simple narratives (journalists) and the emphasis on potentially negative impacts (scientists) contribute to this inconsistency. The transformation of an uncertain risk into an actual risk is further caused by two inconsistent risk conceptions, namely risk being the probability of a negative outcome (environmental scientists) or being the uncertainty of a negative outcome itself (public). Although the latter differs from the risks identified “objectively” by scientific methods, it allows understanding the risk perception of the public and decision‐makers.
The framing of microplastics risks is analyzed in scientific papers and online newspapers. While scientists mostly refer to uncertainty in their publications, the media report an actual risk. Conflicting risk conceptions, the need to create simple narratives (journalists) as well as the emphasis on potentially negative impacts (scientists) contribute to this inconsistency.
Background:
News media create a sense-making narrative, shaping, reflecting and enforcing cultural ideas and experiences. Reportage of COVID-related death and bereavement illuminates public ...perceptions of, and responses to, the COVID-19 pandemic.
Aim:
We aimed to explore British newspaper representations of ‘saying goodbye’ before and after a COVID-related death and consider clinical implications.
Design:
Document analysis of UK online newspaper articles published during 2 week-long periods in March–April 2020.
Data sources:
The seven most-read online newspapers were searched: The Guardian, The Daily Mail, The Telegraph, The Mirror, The Sun, The Times and The Metro. Fifty-five articles discussed bereavement after a human death from COVID-19, published during 18/03–24/03/2020 (the UK’s transition into lockdown) or 08/04–14/04/2020 (the UK peak of the pandemic’s first wave).
Results:
The act of ‘saying goodbye’ (before, during and after death) was central to media representations of COVID bereavement, represented as inherently important and profoundly disrupted. Bedside access was portrayed as restricted, variable and uncertain, with families begging or bargaining for contact. Video-link goodbyes were described with ambivalence. Patients were portrayed as ‘dying alone’ regardless of clinician presence. Funerals were portrayed as travesties and grieving alone as unnatural. Articles focused on what was forbidden and offered little practical guidance.
Conclusion:
Newspapers portrayed COVID-19 as disruptive to rituals of ‘saying goodbye’ before, during and after death. Adaptations were presented as insufficient attempts to ameliorate tragic situations. More nuanced and supportive reporting is recommended. Clinicians and other professionals supporting the bereaved can play an important role in offering alternative narratives.
El objetivo de este artículo consiste en identificar la frecuencia y el uso que se les da a los enlaces en dos medios digitales de España y dos de México, su funcionalidad y los sitios a los que se ...vinculan, así como la perspectiva y aprovechamiento que hacen las audiencias de los mismos. Para lograrlo, durante dos semanas se realizó un análisis cuantitativo de cuatro diarios digitales (dos en México y dos en España) y se aplicó una encuesta a 208 estudiantes de licenciatura en dos universidades, una en cada país. Se encontró que la gran mayoría de los enlaces eran utilizados para redirigir a contenidos propios de los medios y había poco esfuerzo por vincularse con sitios externos. Al menos la mitad de los encuestados consideraron relevante que los enlaces sean funcionales, de tal forma que, si hay un enlace roto, abandonan la lectura. Estos resultados apuntan a que hay una disparidad entre el aprovechamiento de los hipervínculos por parte de los medios de comunicación y la importancia que estos tienen para las audiencias
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