Paper: Kate Starbird, “Examining the Alternative Media Ecosystem through the Production of Alternative Narratives of Mass Shooting Events on Twitter”
Summary:
The author(s) in this paper did a very deep analysis of the alternative media ecosystem through data collected from twitter about shooting events during 2016. He performed both quantitative and qualitative analysis and included different dimensions (such as political leaning, narrative stance, account types … etc) to facilitate better understanding the data and findings.
Reflection:
- I would like to do a similar analysis of voting events such as the Brexit and the US 2016 presidential election. I believe the findings about the political leaning would be similar (anti-globalist alternative media promoting the Brexit and Trump election)
- I would prefer if the author did also a similar analysis but for each event in separate and compare the similarity between them. Since the data represent events scattered temporally and geologically
- The findings in the paper regarding how the U.S. Alt right media always accused mainstream media of making fake news and they introduce themselves as anti-globalists. Those findings remind me about how often Trump used to call mainstream media as “fake news” in his tweets (more than 500 times) and he declared his statement in the UN as anti-globalist. Those anti-globalist movements in the media inspire me to do more analysis about how social media played a significant role promoting the rise of the right anti-globalists in the western world (specially during the political elections in Europe in the past few years)
- I think it would have helped the author in his analysis if he employed some community structure analysis on the graph in order to abstract and summarize it
- The author mentioned that he is left-leaning and the findings in figure 3 showed that the right-leaning alt medias are the most dominating source of conspiracy news., specially that the analysis relied on lots of qualitative work. I do not know if the results are biased or not but that raises questions about those finding and might require more analysis to verify that. Also it made me wonder how an author could control his preferences (political, religious, sexual … etc) while conducting a qualitative study that requires the author’s own interventions and selections?
- How could we teach people about the leaning of such media? Mainstream media which are easier to classify their bias due to their source of funding and connections which might be clear to the ordinary user. While on the other hand non-mainstream media are harder track and verify their agenda. I think if have some website/database of such media that is updated regularly would help to track them and classify their leaning and understand the message they are spreading.
