Abstract
Media outlets and pundits have been quick to embrace online social networks to disseminate their own opinions. But pundits' opinions and news coverage are often marked by a clear political bias, as widely evidenced during the fiercely contested 2012 U.S. presidential elections. Given the wide availability of such data from sites like Twitter, a natural question is whether we can quantify the political leanings of media outlets using OSN data. In this work, by drawing a correspondence between tweeting and retweeting behavior, we formulate political leaning estimation as an ill-posed linear inverse problem. The result is a simple and scalable approach that does not require explicit knowledge of the network topology. We evaluate our method with a dataset of 119 million election-related tweets collected from April to November, and use it to study the political leaning of prominent tweeters and media sources.
Original language | English (US) |
---|---|
Pages | 640-649 |
Number of pages | 10 |
State | Published - 2013 |
Event | 7th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, ICWSM 2013 - Cambridge, MA, United States Duration: Jul 8 2013 → Jul 11 2013 |
Other
Other | 7th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, ICWSM 2013 |
---|---|
Country/Territory | United States |
City | Cambridge, MA |
Period | 7/8/13 → 7/11/13 |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Media Technology