2021/09/27 by Darwish, Kareem · 1 citation
#Computers and Society (cs.CY) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Social and Information Networks (cs.SI)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2109.12844
This paper examines news consumption in response to a major polarizing event, and we use the May 2021 Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an example. We conduct a detailed analysis of the news consumption of more than eight thousand Twitter users who are either pro-Palestinian or pro-Israeli and authored more than 29 million tweets between January 1 and August 17, 2021. We identified the stance of users using unsupervised stance detection. We observe that users may consume more topically-related content from foreign and less popular sources, because, unlike popular sources, they may reaffirm their views, offer more extreme, hyper-partisan, or sensational content, or provide more in depth coverage of the event. The sudden popularity of such sources may not translate to longer-term or general popularity on other topics.