ABSTRACT
This paper aims to shed light on alternative news media ecosystems that are believed to have influenced opinions and beliefs by false and/or biased news reporting during the 2016 US Presidential Elections. We examine a large, professionally curated list of 668 hyper-partisan websites and their corresponding Facebook pages, and identify key characteristics that mediate the traffic flow within this ecosystem. We uncover a pattern of new websites being established in the run up to the elections, and abandoned after. Such websites form an ecosystem, creating links from one website to another, and by 'liking' each others' Facebook pages. These practices are highly effective in directing user traffic internally within the ecosystem in a highly partisan manner, with right-leaning sites linking to and liking other right-leaning sites and similarly left-leaning sites linking to other sites on the left, thus forming a filter bubble amongst news producers similar to the filter bubble which has been widely observed among consumers of partisan news. Whereas there is activity along both left- and right-leaning sites, right-leaning sites are more evolved, accounting for a disproportionate number of abandoned websites and partisan internal links. We also examine demographic characteristics of consumers of hyper partisan news and find that some of the more populous demographic groups in the US tend to be consumers of more right-leaning sites.
- Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow. 2017. Social media and fake news in the 2016 election. National Bureau of Economic Research No. w23089 (2017).Google ScholarCross Ref
- Mona Chalabi. 2016. Trump's angry white men and why there are more of them than you think. (2016). https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/08/ angry-white-men-love-donald-trumpGoogle Scholar
- Richa Chaturvedi. 2016. A closer look at the gender gap in presidential voting. (2016). http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/07/28/ a-closer-look-at-the-gender-gap-in-presidential-voting/Google Scholar
- James A. Davis. 2004. Did Growing up in the 1960s Leave a Permanent Mark on Attitudes and Values Evidence from the General Social Survey. The Public Opinion Quarterly 68, 2 (2004), 161--183. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3521588Google ScholarCross Ref
- Samantha Finn, Panagiotis Takis Metaxas, and Eni Mustafaraj. 2014. Investigating rumor propagation with twittertrails. arXiv preprint arXiv:1411.3550 (2014).Google Scholar
- Seth Flaxman, Sharad Goel, and Justin M Rao. 2016. Filter bubbles, echo chambers, and online news consumption. Public Opinion Quarterly 80, S1 (2016), 298--320.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Kiran Garimella, Gianmarco De Francisci Morales, Aristides Gionis, and Michael Mathioudakis. 2017. Reducing controversy by connecting opposing views. In Proceedings of the Tenth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining. ACM, 81--90. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Steven M. Gillon. 2017. Why are so many white men so angry (2017). https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/08/ 29/why-are-so-many-white-men-so-angry/Google Scholar
- Jeffery Gottfried and Elisa Shearer. 2016. News Use Across Social Media Platforms 2016. (2016). http://www.journalism.org/2016/05/26/ news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2016/Google Scholar
- Jeffery Gottfried and Elisa Shearer. 2017. Americans' Attitudes About the News Media Deeply Divided Along Partisan Lines. (2017). http://www.journalism.org/2017/05/10/ americans-attitudes-about-the-news-media-deeply-divided-along-partisan-lines/Google Scholar
- David Gourley and Brian Totty. 2002. HTTP: the definitive guide. " O'Reilly Media, Inc.". Google ScholarDigital Library
- J. Herrman. 2016. Inside Facebook's (Totally Insane, Unintentionally Gigantic, Hyperpartisan) Political-Media Machine. (24 Aug. 2016). https://nyti.ms/2k82R8IGoogle Scholar
- Jenny Holland. 2011. Generation Gap Young versus Old Voters and Presidential Candidate Preference. Western Political Science Association 2011 Annual Meeting Paper (2011).Google Scholar
- Benjamin D. Horne and Sibel Adali. 2017. This Just In: Fake News Packs a Lot in Title, Uses Simpler, Repetitive Content in Text Body, More Similar to Satire than Real News. CoRR abs/1703.09398 (2017).Google Scholar
- Dmytro Karamshuk, Tetyana Lokot, Oleksandr Pryymak, and Nishanth Sastry. 2016. Identifying Partisan Slant in News Articles and Twitter During Political Crises. In Social Informatics, Emma Spiro and Yong-Yeol Ahn (Eds.). Springer International Publishing, Cham, 257--272.Google Scholar
- Sejeong Kwon, Meeyoung Cha, Kyomin Jung, Wei Chen, and Yajun Wang. 2013. Prominent features of rumor propagation in online social media. In Data Mining (ICDM), 2013 IEEE 13th International Conference on. IEEE, 1103--1108.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Eric Lawrence, John Sides, and Henry Farrell. 2010. Self-segregation or deliberation Blog readership, participation, and polarization in American politics. Perspectives on Politics 8, 1 (2010), 141--157.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Jan E Leighley and Arnold Vedlitz. 1999. Race, ethnicity, and political participation: Competing models and contrasting explanations. The Journal of Politics 61, 4 (1999), 1092--1114.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Elisa Maniam and Samantha Smith. 2017. Americans' Attitudes About the News Media Deeply Divided Along Partisan Lines. (2017). http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/03/20/ a-wider-partisan-and-ideological-gap-between-younger-older-generations/Google Scholar
- Dung T Nguyen, Nam P Nguyen, and My T Thai. 2012. Sources of misinformation in online social networks: Who to suspect. In Military Communications Conference, 2012-MILCOM 2012. IEEE, 1--6.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Greg Orelind. 2017. Top 6 Myths About The Alexa Traffic Rank. (2017). https: //blog.alexa.com/top-6-myths-about-the-alexa-traffic-rank/Google Scholar
- Lawrence Page, Sergey Brin, Rajeev Motwani, and Terry Winograd. 1999. The PageRank citation ranking: Bringing order to the web. Technical Report. Stanford InfoLab.Google Scholar
- Eli Pariser. 2011. The filter bubble: What the Internet is hiding from you. Penguin UK. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Emilee Rader and Rebecca Gray. 2015. Understanding user beliefs about algorithmic curation in the Facebook news feed. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 173--182. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Criag Silverman, Jane Lytvynenko, Lam Thuy Vo, and Jeremy Singer-Vine. 2017. Inside The Partisan Fight For Your News Feed. (2017). https://www.buzzfeed. com/craigsilverman/inside-the-partisan-fight-for-your-news-feedGoogle Scholar
- Kate Starbird. 2017. Examining the Alternative Media Ecosystem Through the Production of Alternative Narratives of Mass Shooting Events on Twitter. In ICWSM. 230--239.Google Scholar
- Samanth Subrahmanian. 2017. Inside the Macedonian Fake-News complex. (2017). https://www.wired.com/2017/02/veles-macedonia-fake-news/Google Scholar
- Liwen Vaughan and Rongbin Yang. 2013. Web traffic and organization performance measures: Relationships and data sources examined. Journal of informetrics 7, 3 (2013), 699--711.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Sidney Verba and Norman H Nie. 1987. Participation in America: Political democracy and social equality. University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
- Savvas Zannettou, Tristan Caulfield, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Nicolas Kourtelris, Ilias Leontiadis, Michael Sirivianos, Gianluca Stringhini, and Jeremy Blackburn. 2017. The web centipede: understanding how web communities influence each other through the lens of mainstream and alternative news sources. In Proceedings of the 2017 Internet Measurement Conference. ACM, 405--417. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Illuminating an Ecosystem of Partisan Websites
Recommendations
Partisan alignments and political polarization online: a computational approach to understanding the french and US presidential elections
PLEAD '13: Proceedings of the 2nd workshop on Politics, elections and dataWith the advent of Twitter and the ability to collect large datasets from this technology, researchers have the opportunity to analyze political participation in cross-national electoral contexts. This paper capitalizes on this capability to examine ...
Political Discourse Strategies Used in Twitter during Gezi Park Protests: A Comparison of Two Rival Political Parties in Turkey
Along with the growing use of twitter as a tool of political interaction, recently, there has also been an attention in the academia to understand and explain how and why politicians use twitter, and what its impact on the political outcomes are. On the ...
Political Interaction Beyond Party Lines: Communication Ties and Party Polarization in Parliamentary Twitter Networks
A growing body of research has examined the uptake of social media by politicians, the formation of communication ties in online political networks, and the interplay between social media and political polarization. However, few studies have analyzed how ...
Comments