Armed conflicts in online news: A multilingual study

Robert West, Jurgen Pfeffer

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

Wars and conflicts have constituted major events throughout history. Despite their importance, the general public typically learns about such events only indirectly, through the lens of news media, which necessarily select and distort events before relaying them to readers. Quantifying these processes is important, as they are fundamental to how we see the world, but the task is difficult, as it requires working with large and representative datasets of unstructured news text in many languages. To address these issues, we propose a set of unsupervised methods for compiling and analyzing a multilingual corpus of millions of online news documents about armed conflicts. We then apply our methods to answer a number of research questions: First, how widely are armed conflicts covered by online news media in various languages, and how does this change as conflicts progress? Second, what role does the level of violence of a conflict play? And third, how well informed is a reader when following a limited number of online news sources? We find that coverage levels are different across conflicts, but similar across languages for a given conflict; that Middle Eastern conflicts receive more attention than African conflicts, even when controlling for the level of violence; and that for most languages and conflicts, following very few sources is enough to stay continuously informed. Finally, given the prominence of conflicts in the Middle East, we further analyze them in a detailed case study.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 11th International Conference on Web and Social Media, ICWSM 2017
PublisherAAAI Press
Pages309-318
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781577357889
StatePublished - 2017
Event11th International Conference on Web and Social Media, ICWSM 2017 - Montreal, Canada
Duration: 15 May 201718 May 2017

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 11th International Conference on Web and Social Media, ICWSM 2017

Conference

Conference11th International Conference on Web and Social Media, ICWSM 2017
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityMontreal
Period15/05/1718/05/17

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