Global News Research Articles

The Authenticity of Information on Social Media

The dawn of the electronic age has led to the rapid growth of social networking platforms, which have become an inevitable part of our lives by satisfying our ever-growing expectations. They yield a variety of services, such as a platform for interpersonal networking opportunities, data sharing, a resource for local and global news, and many more. The most important service is the ability to provide a replacement of traditional mass media (newspapers, televisions, etc.) for accessing and distributing news. This transition is caused by the ease of access, low costs, and the capabilities of receiving the news/information in an instantaneous manner. During a 2020 survey, more than 70 percent of respondents from Kenya, South Africa, Chile, Bulgaria, Greece, and Argentina stated that they used social media as a source of news. Conversely, less than 40 percent of adults in France, the UK, Germany, and Japan reported the same. However, a large portion of social media users admit that although they do not trust social networking sites as a media source, or as a source to get news, they continue to use it on a consistent basis [1].

Misinformation, manipulation, and abuse on social media in the era of COVID-19.

The COVID-19 pandemic represented an unprecedented setting for the spread of online misinformation, manipulation, and abuse, with the potential to cause dramatic real-world consequences. The aim of this special issue was to collect contributions investigating issues such as the emergence of infodemics, misinformation, conspiracy theories, automation, and online harassment on the onset of the coronavirus outbreak. Articles in this collection adopt a diverse range of methods and techniques, and focus on the study of the narratives that fueled conspiracy theories, on the diffusion patterns of COVID-19 misinformation, on the global news sentiment, on hate speech and social bot interference, and on multimodal Chinese propaganda. The diversity of the methodological and scientific approaches undertaken in the aforementioned articles demonstrates the interdisciplinarity of these issues. In turn, these crucial endeavors might anticipate a growing trend of studies where diverse theories, models, and techniques will be combined to tackle the different aspects of online misinformation, manipulation, and abuse.

Reporting Bias in Coverage of Iran Protests by Global News Agencies

This study examines reporting on protests in Iran between late December 2017 and early January 2018 by global news agencies located in the United States (Associated Press [AP]), United Kingdom (Reuters), France (Agence France-Presse [AFP]), China (Xinhua), and Russia (Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union [TASS]). A census of reporting on the protests ( N = 369) was content analyzed. Results demonstrate that news agencies varied considerably in their portrayal of issues defined as problems, diagnosis of causes, moral evaluations, and treatment recommendations. Reporting by Xinhua differed considerably from Western news agencies and featured a greater proportion of stories recommending maintenance of the status quo in Iran. Calls for political change received more attention in privately owned news agencies based in democratic nations. While the use of sources in news stories was generally similar across agencies, protesters were absent in reporting by state-owned agencies. Results conclude that differences in national interests and/or ownership of global news agencies may explain findings and provide insight into news reporting on foreign protest.

COVID-19 and the neo-liberal paradigm in higher education: changing landscape

PurposeThis article aims to provide a timely examination of and reflection on the impact of COVID-19 on the neo-liberal paradigm that has been prevalent in international higher education (HE) for two decades since the late 1990s.Design/methodology/approachMethodologically, this paper deploys conceptual mapping as an analytical tool to explore and examine the global news updates that provide timely (i.e. early 2020) record of the fast-moving pandemic.FindingsIt unfolds four pairs of contradictions occurring in the Western universities during the pandemic outbreak, i.e. HE as cross-border services vs border control, the state's shrinking public funding vs universities under financial threat, increased reliance on foreign students' tuition fee vs decreased international enrolment and the user-pays philosophy vs the rising force of user says.Research limitations/implicationsIt is argued that the pending crises facing Western universities are not merely financial issues; they reveal the shortcomings that are inherent in business model of HE driven by economic globalisation but triggered by coronavirus pandemic to erupt. The pandemic should be temporary, but its spill-over effects may alter the overarching landscape of the international HE relations, which is part and parcel of the changing geopolitical order featured as de-globalisation.Practical implicationsThe paper has practical implications for acting on international HE in the time of coronavirus pandemic. They mainly consider four aspects: (1) travel distance as new determinant of study abroad, (2) the renewed significance of a state's role in policymaking and financial undertaking, (3) shortcomings in market mechanism and (4) East Asia as an emerging regional hub of study abroad.Social implicationsThis paper is expected to leverage three lessons learned from the upending situation. First, it is conceptually misleading to define international HE as a form of market-led “transnational service” and cross-border tradeable product undermining a state's control. Second, a state's supervising model needs to be reviewed, to embrace the renewed relationship between a state and universities in the new context of global pandemic. Third, the global landscape of international HE may be altered.Originality/valueThis conceptual paper provides a timely critique of the neo-liberal paradigm in HE and shedding light on the changing global landscape of international HE along with the changing geopolitical relations reshuffled by COVID-19 and its spill-over effects.

Публичные арены игровых стримов (на примере репрезентации темы коронавируса)

Video streaming has become very popular among game enthusiasts. Live streams of computer games, where there is the possibility of communi­cation, are developing as community meeting places; a number of social scientists are calling this a trend towards new online “third places”. To­day’s debate draws attention to the reproduction of a participation culture trough streaming, in the space of which everyone can express themselves creatively, share their opinion, experiences, and information. At the same time, there is a tendency towards the capitalist appropriation of streaming by media businesspersons who stimulate the monetization of participation. Investigating the “sociality of streaming”, the authors highlight the supplementation of the “Let’s Play” discourse with topics from the current agenda, understanding live streams as public media arenas. In the public arenas of computer game live streams, the dramatization and selection of global or local news information in a specific media format takes place. The article demonstrates this phenomenon using the example of the corona­virus, the most prominent topic of spring 2020. The pandemic vocabulary appears in different sections of Twitch game streams, such as titles, audio/ video content, and the chat. Banter and obscene vocabulary are charac­teristic of the game stream space, however, this is combined with charity fund-raising broadcasts in support of doctors. ­

When it Pays to Ignore: Focusing on Top News and their Sentiment

Relying on over 300 million news sentiment scores from a global news source covering a battery of different news topics and their sentiment, we construct a novel measure called top news sentiment based on rolling correlations with equity returns. We find an effect of top news sentiment on stock returns with robust timeframes. These findings add to the sentiment literature with the first dynamically created sentiment variable. We are able to construct profitable trading strategies based on top news sentiment. It therefore pays off for investors to be inattentive to most news topics and their sentiment.

Detecting and Tracking Significant Events for Individuals on Twitter by Monitoring the Evolution of Twitter Followership Networks

People publish tweets on Twitter to share everything from global news to their daily life. Abundant user-generated content makes Twitter become one of the major channels for people to obtain information about real-world events. Event detection techniques help to extract events from massive amounts of Twitter data. However, most existing techniques are based on Twitter information streams, which contain plenty of noise and polluted content that would affect the accuracy of the detecting result. In this article, we present an event discovery method based on the change of the user’s followers, which can detect the occurrences of significant events relevant to the particular user. We divide these events into categories according to the positive or negative effect on the specific user. Further, we observe the evolution of individuals’ followership networks and analyze the dynamics of networks. The results show that events have different effects on the evolution of different features of Twitter followership networks. Our findings may play an important role for realizing how patterns of social interaction are impacted by events and can be applied in fields such as public opinion monitoring, disaster warning, crisis management, and intelligent decision making.

Building an Open Resources Repository for COVID-19 Research

The COVID-19 outbreak is a global pandemic declared by the World Health Organization, with rapidly increasing cases in most countries. A wide range of research is urgently needed for understanding the COVID-19 pandemic, such as transmissibility, geographic spreading, risk factors for infections, and economic impacts. Reliable data archive and sharing are essential to jump-start innovative research to combat COVID-19. This research is a collaborative and innovative effort in building such an archive, including the collection of various data resources relevant to COVID-19 research, such as daily cases, social media, population mobility, health facilities, climate, socioeconomic data, research articles, policy and regulation, and global news. Due to the heterogeneity between data sources, our effort also includes processing and integrating different datasets based on GIS (Geographic Information System) base maps to make them relatable and comparable. To keep the data files permanent, we published all open data to the Harvard Dataverse (https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/2019ncov), an online data management and sharing platform with a permanent Digital Object Identifier number for each dataset. Finally, preliminary studies are conducted based on the shared COVID-19 datasets and revealed different spatial transmission patterns among mainland China, Italy, and the United States.

LGBT individuals and the struggle against Robert Mugabe's extirpation in Zimbabwe

ABSTRACT Queer identities and non-heteronormative sexualities are increasingly becoming visible globally and Zimbabwe has witnessed an emergent queer mobilization and sexual identities politics. There have been significant attempts to expunge non-heterosexuals from Zimbabwean citizenry by drawing borders on the basis of sexual orientation. Over the years, western and local media have mediated a narrative of a thoroughly homophobic Zimbabwe, not the least emanating from the former president, Robert Mugabe's homophobic utterances which recurrently generated global news stories. A dominant discourse framed homosexual identities as on or beyond the border of what is socially acceptable, whilst the individuals with queer identities have been denied legal protection and status. Predominantly, homophobic sentiments are expressed, often reflecting the view that homosexual identities should not be given space in Zimbabwe, nor should anything associated with it be tolerated. The populist arguments are based on among other things, depicting heterosexuality as ‘natural’, homosexuality as ‘uncultural’ and ‘unChristian’, and stereotyping gay people as licentious. Drawing on ethnographic research, this paper explores how LGBT people in Harare perceive, make sense of and cope with the infamous hate speech, ‘worse than dogs and pigs’, by the former president and the implications of this on their self-perception as they defiantly express a narrative of self-affirmation challenging the marginal status in popularized discourse.

Detecting Cyber Threat Event from Twitter Using IDCNN and BiLSTM

In the context of increasing cyber threats and attacks, monitoring and analyzing network security incidents in a timely and effective way is the key to ensuring network infrastructure security. As one of the world’s most popular social media sites, users post all kinds of messages on Twitter, from daily life to global news and political strategy. It can aggregate a large number of network security-related events promptly and provide a source of information flow about cyber threats. In this paper, for detecting cyber threat events on Twitter, we present a multi-task learning approach based on the natural language processing technology and machine learning algorithm of the Iterated Dilated Convolutional Neural Network (IDCNN) and Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) to establish a highly accurate network model. Furthermore, we collect a network threat-related Twitter database from the public datasets to verify our model’s performance. The results show that the proposed model works well to detect cyber threat events from tweets and significantly outperform several baselines.

Comparisons of the City Brand Influence of Global Cities: Word-Embedding Based Semantic Mining and Clustering Analysis on the Big Data of GDELT Global News Knowledge Graph

Global cities act as influential hubs in the networked world. Their city brands, which are projected by the global news media, are becoming sustainable resources in various global competitions and cooperations. This study adopts the research paradigm of computational social science to assess and compare the city brand attention, positivity, and influence of ten Globalization and World Cities Research Network (GaWC) Alpha+ global cities, along with their dimensional structures, based on combining the cognitive and affective theoretical perspectives on the frameworks of the Anholt global city brand dimension system, the big data of global news knowledge graph in Google’s Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT), and the technologies of word-embedding semantic mining and clustering analysis. The empirical results show that the overall values and dimensional structures of city brand influence of global cities form distinct levels and clusters, respectively. Although global cities share a common structural characteristic of city brand influence of the dimensions of presence and potential being most prominent, Western and Eastern global cities differentiate in the clustering of dimensional structures of city brand attention, positivity, and influence. City brand attention is more important than city brand positivity in improving the city brand influence of global cities. The preferences of the global news media over global city brands fits the nature of global cities.

From Robots to Humans: Newspaper Coverage of Mars in the United States and the United Kingdom 2011–2016

ABSTRACT The global news media have documented space science and missions since the space race began in the 1950s. Only recently has that coverage turned toward Mars exploration and colonization as more governments and private enterprises join the race to the Red Planet. This study compares the framing of Mars coverage from 2011 through 2016 in three influential newspapers in the United States, where NASA and many private companies lead the charge, with three newspapers in the United Kingdom, an allied yet competitive country with less of a vested interest in reaching Mars. A content analysis found that many frames from past space missions were adapted for the Red Planet, such as exploration, scientific knowledge, business, nationalism, settlement, legacy, and fear, while new frames emerged, including life, human health, social justice, and social engagement. The framing and tone of Mars articles were similar in both countries despite their different positions in the Mars race. From the launch of Sputnik to potential human exploration of Mars, each successive era of space exploration has been framed in a logical progression from concept to completion that resonates with the values of the times.

The role of wire services in the new millennium: An examination of the foreign-reporting about Latin America in the German press

Given the substantial impact of the Internet and social media on the contemporary process of news selection, this article studies the current role of news agencies as agenda-setters in global news reporting. With a focus on the foreign-reporting of Latin America within the prestigious national press in Germany, we analysed the articles’ authorship from four sources: two market-leading German dailies – ‘ Süddeutsche Zeitung’ and ‘ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung’ – the weekly ‘ Der Spiegel’ and, the alternative newspaper ‘ tageszeitung’ (taz). The corpus comprises 3831 articles published between 2000 and 2014. In addition, eight (semi-structured) interviews with German correspondents in Latin America were conducted to comprehend their relationship with the editorial offices and the indirect use of wire services. We observe that not only is the agency-copy low (8.9%) when compared with other world regions, but direct agency use has also been declining. However, further indicators show that the thematic orientation remains powerful. Moreover, the interviewees confirm the agencies’ impact on their work.

Learning Arabic Media Related Vocabulary through Twitter at the University of Alabama

This research paper aims to investigate the effect of utilizing Twitter in a foreign language classroom and how it would affect students’ attitudes towards learning Arabic media related vocabulary. The researchers used qualitative and quantitative methods as a methodological approach to the study. The subjects of the study are American undergraduate students studying Arabic for their third semester, 11 participated in the study. The participants were asked to open Twitter accounts in order to practice reading up-to-date tweets from global news agencies. Participants took pre and post-tests, then were asked to take a questionnaire; a structured interview was also carried out along with reflections to have a better understanding of the students’ attitude towards the use of Twitter in the classroom. The data were gathered throughout the semester and analyzed qualitatively and the participants’ responses were coded for certain themes and then analyzed. The findings indicated that the students had a positive attitude towards the use of Twitter in learning vocabulary for specific topics -in this study media/political-related vocabulary- in the foreign language classroom. In addition, the quantitative data used as confirmation and showed vocabulary gains after the Twitter treatment. The study’s findings can be applied to any foreign language and can have important implications and recommendations for language teachers and educators in the field. The findings will add valuable recommendations on how to integrate social media platforms in a foreign language classroom.

Correlation between the Spread of COVID-19 and the Interest in Personal Protective Measures in Poland and Portugal.

The pandemic of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), has gained extensive coverage in public media and global news, generated international and national communication campaigns to educate the communities worldwide and raised the attention of everyone. The coronavirus has caused viral pneumonia in tens of thousands of people around the world, and the COVID-19 outbreak changed most countries’ routines and concerns and transformed social behaviour. This study explores the potential use of Google Trends (GT) in monitoring interest in the COVID-19 outbreak and, specifically, in personal protective equipment and hand hygiene, since these have been promoted by official health care bodies as two of the most protective measures. GT was chosen as a source of reverse engineering data, given the interest in the topic and the novelty of the research. Current data on COVID-19 are retrieved from GT using keywords in two languages—Portuguese and Polish. The geographical settings for GT are two countries: Poland and Portugal. The period under analysis is 20 January 2020, when the first cases outside China were known, to 15 June 2020. The results show that there is a correlation between the spread of COVID-19 and the search for personal protective equipment and hand hygiene and that GT can help, to a certain extent, understand people’s concerns, behaviour and reactions to sanitary problems and protection recommendations.

Sentiments and emotions evoked by news headlines of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak

The chronic nature of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak and lack of success in treatment and cure is creating an environment that is crucial for mental wellbeing. Presently, we extracted and classified sentiments and emotions from 141,208 headlines of global English news sources regarding the coronavirus disease (COVID-19). The headlines considered were those carrying keyword coronavirus between the time frame 15 Janaury, 2020 to 3 June, 2020 from top rated 25 English news sources. The headlines were classified into positive, negative and neutral sentiments after the calculation of text unbounded polarity at the sentence level score and incorporating the valence shifters. In addition, the National Research Council Canada (NRC) Word-Emotion Lexicon was used to calculate the presence of eight emotions at their emotional weight. The results reveal that the news headlines had high emotional scores with a negative polarity. More precisely, around 52% of the news headlines evoked negative sentiments and only 30% evoked positive sentiments while 18% were neutral. Fear, trust, anticipation, sadness, and anger were the main emotions evoked by the news headlines. Overall, the findings of this study can be weaved together into important implications for emotional wellbeing and economic perspective.

ASLO 2020 Award Winners

<scp>ASLO</scp> 2020 Award Winners

Did the world overlook the media’s early warning of COVID-19?

This perspective is written to give a rapid response to discuss the role of media in risk communication in the first three months of the COVID-19 pandemic. We analyze two sets of media data, China’s social media and global news event, and draw a few initial observations in relation to the impacts of China’s information control policy, global risk governance, and the role of WHO.

Early epidemiological analysis of the coronavirus disease 2019 outbreak based on crowdsourced data: a population-level observational study

SummaryBackgroundAs the outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) progresses, epidemiological data are needed to guide situational awareness and intervention strategies. Here we describe efforts to compile and disseminate epidemiological information on COVID-19 from news media and social networks.MethodsIn this population-level observational study, we searched DXY.cn, a health-care-oriented social network that is currently streaming news reports on COVID-19 from local and national Chinese health agencies. We compiled a list of individual patients with COVID-19 and daily province-level case counts between Jan 13 and Jan 31, 2020, in China. We also compiled a list of internationally exported cases of COVID-19 from global news media sources (Kyodo News, The Straits Times, and CNN), national governments, and health authorities. We assessed trends in the epidemiology of COVID-19 and studied the outbreak progression across China, assessing delays between symptom onset, seeking care at a hospital or clinic, and reporting, before and after Jan 18, 2020, as awareness of the outbreak increased. All data were made publicly available in real time.FindingsWe collected data for 507 patients with COVID-19 reported between Jan 13 and Jan 31, 2020, including 364 from mainland China and 143 from outside of China. 281 (55%) patients were male and the median age was 46 years (IQR 35–60). Few patients (13 [3%]) were younger than 15 years and the age profile of Chinese patients adjusted for baseline demographics confirmed a deficit of infections among children. Across the analysed period, delays between symptom onset and seeking care at a hospital or clinic were longer in Hubei province than in other provinces in mainland China and internationally. In mainland China, these delays decreased from 5 days before Jan 18, 2020, to 2 days thereafter until Jan 31, 2020 (p=0·0009). Although our sample captures only 507 (5·2%) of 9826 patients with COVID-19 reported by official sources during the analysed period, our data align with an official report published by Chinese authorities on Jan 28, 2020.InterpretationNews reports and social media can help reconstruct the progression of an outbreak and provide detailed patient-level data in the context of a health emergency. The availability of a central physician-oriented social network facilitated the compilation of publicly available COVID-19 data in China. As the outbreak progresses, social media and news reports will probably capture a diminishing fraction of COVID-19 cases globally due to reporting fatigue and overwhelmed health-care systems. In the early stages of an outbreak, availability of public datasets is important to encourage analytical efforts by independent teams and provide robust evidence to guide interventions.FundingFogarty International Center, US National Institutes of Health.

What Is a Superfood Anyway? Six Key Ingredients for Making a Food “Super”

The category of superfoods first gained traction in the mid-1980s and has only become more prevalent since. Despite this popularity, contestations exist over the validity of the term, the science behind it, and its utility for consumers. However, systematic and scholarly investigations into the idea of the superfood remain limited. Using content and discourse analyses on global English-speaking news media, this paper examines the breadth of comestibles considered superfoods, the ways in which these foods are being mobilized to address particular health concerns, and the wider socio, political, and environmental contexts surrounding superfoods. Our analysis revealed a total of 217 foods were considered superfoods, and were linked to 71 conditions, that primarily emphasize the ability of individuals to optimize their health by preventing possible future illness. We contend that socio-environmental researchers have much to offer into critical investigations of the superfoods phenomenon.