Visualizing media bias through Twitter

• Main Authors: AN, Jisun, CHA, Meeyoung, GUMMADI, Krishna, CROWCROFT, Jon, QUERIA, Daniele
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2012
• Subjects: Media outlets; News information; News media; Political news; social media; Twitter; Databases and Information Systems; Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing; Social Influence and Political Communication; Social Media
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/6284; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/7287/viewcontent/14343_Article_Text_17861_1_2_20201228_pv.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Traditional media outlets are known to report political news in a biased way, potentially affecting the political beliefs of the audience and even altering their voting behaviors. Therefore, tracking bias in everyday news and building a platform where people can receive balanced news information is important. We propose a model that maps the news media sources along a dimensional dichotomous political spectrum using the co-subscriptions relationships inferred by Twitter links. By analyzing 7 million follow links, we show that the political dichotomy naturally arises on Twitter when we only consider direct media subscription. Furthermore, we demonstrate a real-time Twitter-based application that visualizes an ideological map of various media sources.