research-article

Fringe News Networks: Dynamics of US News Viewership following the 2020 Presidential Election

Authors:

Ashiqur R. Khudabukhsh,

Mark S. Kamlet,

Tom M. MitchellAuthors Info & Claims

WebSci '22: Proceedings of the 14th ACM Web Science Conference 2022

Pages 269 - 278

https://doi.org/10.1145/3501247.3531577

Published: 26 June 2022 Publication History

Abstract

The growing political polarization of the American electorate over the last several decades has been widely studied and documented. During the administration of President Donald Trump, charges of “fake news” made social and news media not only the means but, to an unprecedented extent, the topic of political communication. This extreme political polarization continued through the election and all through the period up to the attempted takeover of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. In this paper, we analyze this tumultuous phase in American history through the lens of news viewership. We consider the official YouTube channels of six US cable news networks across a wide political spectrum with a specific focus on three conservative fringe news networks. We analyze how the viewers reacted to the different ways the election outcome was covered by these news outlets. This paper makes two distinct types of contributions. The first is to introduce a novel methodology to analyze large social media data to study the dynamics of US news networks and their viewers. The second is to provide insights into what actually happened regarding these news networks and their viewerships during this volatile 64 day period. Our empirical evidence suggest that recent natural language processing advancements can be harnessed in a synergistic way to mine political insights from large scale social media data.

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KhudaBukhsh A(2024)Deceptively simple: An outsider's perspective on natural language processingAI Magazine10.1002/aaai.12204Online publication date: 21-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.1002/aaai.12204
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Index Terms

Fringe News Networks: Dynamics of US News Viewership following the 2020 Presidential Election

Index terms have been assigned to the content through auto-classification.

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cover image ACM Conferences

WebSci '22: Proceedings of the 14th ACM Web Science Conference 2022

June 2022

479 pages

ISBN:9781450391917

DOI:10.1145/3501247

General Chairs:
Ricardo Baeza-Yates
Northeastern University, MA, USA & Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain
,
Katrin Weller
GESIS & Center for Advanced Internet Studies, Germany
,
Organizing Chair:
Manuel Portela
Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain
,
Program Chairs:
Oshani Seneviratne
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, NY, USA
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Ingmar Weber
Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar
,
Taha Yasseri
University College Dublin, Ireland
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Publications Chairs:
Anna Bon
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands
,
Srinath Srinivas
International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore, India
,
Luis-Daniel Ibáñez
University of Southampton, UK

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Published: 26 June 2022

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WebSci '22: 14th ACM Web Science Conference 2022

June 26 - 29, 2022

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Cited By

Dubois D(2024)Cable news advertising: Applying formal analysis to uncover current trends in self-promotional marketingMedia, Culture & Society10.1177/0163443724124915146:6(1299-1311)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437241249151
Chowdhury MDatta SSharma NKhudaBukhsh AChua TNgo CKa-Wei Lee RKumar RLauw H(2024)Infrastructure Ombudsman: Mining Future Failure Concerns from Structural Disaster ResponseProceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202410.1145/3589334.3648153(4664-4673)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3589334.3648153
KhudaBukhsh A(2024)Deceptively simple: An outsider's perspective on natural language processingAI Magazine10.1002/aaai.12204Online publication date: 21-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.1002/aaai.12204
Yoo CKhudabukhsh AWilliams BChen YNeville J(2023)Auditing and robustifying COVID-19 misinformation datasets via anticontent samplingProceedings of the Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Thirty-Fifth Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence and Thirteenth Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence10.1609/aaai.v37i12.26780(15260-15268)Online publication date: 7-Feb-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1609/aaai.v37i12.26780
Gode SBare SRaj BYoo H(2023)Understanding political polarization using language modelsAI Magazine10.1002/aaai.1210444:3(248-254)Online publication date: 14-Sep-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1002/aaai.12104
Ali RPinto GLawrie ELinstead E(2022)A large-scale sentiment analysis of tweets pertaining to the 2020 US presidential electionJournal of Big Data10.1186/s40537-022-00633-z9:1Online publication date: 16-Jun-2022
https://doi.org/10.1186/s40537-022-00633-z
Villa-Cox RZeng HKhudaBukhsh ACarley K(2022)Linguistic and News-Sharing Polarization During the 2019 South American ProtestsSocial Informatics10.1007/978-3-031-19097-1_5(76-95)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-19097-1_5

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