More Voices Than Ever? Quantifying Media Bias in Networks

By Yu-Ru Lin, James P. Bagrow, David M. J. Lazer. 2011

73 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Social media, such as blogs, are often seen as democratic entities that allow more voices to be heard than the conventional mass or elite media. Some also feel that social media exhibits a balancing force against the arguably slanted elite media. A systematic comparison between social and mainstream media is necessary but challenging due to the scale and dynamic nature of modern communication. Here we propose empirical measures to quantify the extent and dynamics of social (blog) and mainstream (news) media bias. We focus on a particular form of bias--coverage quantity--as applied to stories about the 111th US Congress. We compare observed coverage of Members of Congress against a null model of unbiased coverage, testing for biases with respect to political party, popular front runners, regions of the country, and more. Our measures suggest distinct characteristics in news and blog media. A simple generative model, in agreement with data, reveals differences in the process of coverage selection between the two media.

Subfields: Communication, Sociology and Political Science, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

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Citations in the corpus

Social Data: Biases, Methodological Pitfalls, and Ethical Boundaries (2019, background): “In addition, due to both automated mechanisms and human curation, social media also exhibits common forms of bias present in traditional news media (Lin et al., 2011; Saez-Trumper et al., 2013), including gatekeeping (preference for certain topics), coverage (disparity in attention), and statement…”
A Transformer-based Framework for Neutralizing and Reversing the Political Polarity of News Articles (2021, methodology): “Existing methods either do not take into account context information by selecting words in fixed contexts [36, 67] or suffer limited modeling power on long sequence input [54] (RNN-based methods).”
Social media news communities: gatekeeping, coverage, and statement bias (2013, background): “Recently, [12], examined the presence of coverage bias in mainstream news and blogs.”
Student Attitudes Towards Online Education during the COVID-19 Viral Outbreak of 2020: Distance Learning in a Time of Social Distance (2020, background): “While the public recognize bias in social media and research has found some bias in social media reporting (Lin et al., 2011), particularly on misinformation on medical health portrayed by social media (Wang et al.”