This article explores the uses of sources in coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic in social media posts of mainstream news organizations in Brazil, Chile, Germany, Mexico, Spain, the U.K., and the U.S. Based on computational content analysis, our study analyzes the sources and actors present in more than 940,000 posts on COVID-19 published in the 227 Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts of 78 sampled news outlets between January 1 and December 31 of 2020, comparing their relative importance across countries, across media platforms, and across time as the pandemic evolved in each country. The analysis shows the dominance of political sources across countries and platforms, particularly in Latin America, demonstrating a strong role of the state in constructing pandemic news and suggesting that mainstream news organizations' social media posts maintain a strong elite orientation. Health sources were also prominentconsistent with the defining role of biomedical authority in health coverage-, while significant diversity of sources, including citizen sources, emerged as the pandemic went on. Our results also revealed that the use of specific sources significantly varied over time. These variations tend to go hand in hand with specific global milestones of the pandemic.
This study analyzes the use of social media sources by nine news outlets in Chile in regard to Covid-19. We identified the most frequently used types of sources, their evolution over time, and the differences between the various social media platforms used by the Chilean media during the pandemic. Specifically, we extracted 838,618 messages published by Chilean media on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter between January and December 2020. An initial machine learning (MA) process was applied to automatically identify 168,250 messages that included keywords that link their content to Covid-19. Based on a list of 2,130 entities, another MA process was used to apply a set of rules based on the appearance of declarative verbs or common expressions used by the media when citing a source, and the use of colons or quotation marks to detect the presence of different types of sources in the news content. The results reveal that Chilean media outlets’ use of different voices on social media broadly favored political sources followed by health, citizen, academic-scientific, and economic ones. Although the hierarchy of the most important sources used to narrate the public health crisis tended to remain stable, there were nuances over time, and its variation depended on key historic milestones. An analysis of the use of sources by each platform revealed that Twitter was the least pluralist, giving space to a more restricted group of voices and intensifying the presence of political sources over the others, particularly citizen sources. Finally, our study revealed significant differences across media types in the use of political, health, and citizen sources, with television showing a greater presence than in other types of media. Resumen Se analiza el uso de fuentes en redes sociales de nueve medios de información de referencia en Chile frente al Covid-19. Se identificaron los tipos de fuentes más utilizados, su evolución en el tiempo, así como las diferencias encontradas entre distintas plataformas de redes sociales de los medios chilenos. Específicamente, se extrajeron 838.618 publicaciones de medios nacionales desde Facebook, Instagram y Twitter entre enero y diciembre de 2020. A ese corpus se aplicó un primer proceso de machine learning (MA) para filtrar automáticamente 168.250 publicaciones que incluían palabras claves que identifican su contenido con el Covid-19. A partir de una lista de 2.130 entidades, se utilizó otro proceso de MA para aplicar un conjunto de reglas basadas en la presencia de verbos declarativos o de expresiones comunes usadas por los medios cuando se cita a una entidad, así como el uso de dos puntos o de comillas, con el objeto de detectar distintos tipos de fuentes en el contenido informativo. Los resultados muestran que el uso que los medios chilenos dieron a distintas voces en sus redes sociales favoreció ampliamente a las fuentes políticas, seguidas por las fuentes de salud, y más desde lejos por las ciudadanas, académico-científicas y económicas. Aunque la jerarquía de las fuentes que se usó para narrar la crisis sanitaria tendió a mantenerse estable, tuvo matices a lo largo del tiempo y su variación dependió de los hitos que marcaron la historia del país. Al analizar el uso de fuentes según plataforma, se observa a Twitter como menos pluralista, dando espacio a un grupo más restringido de voces e intensificando la presencia de las fuentes políticas por sobre las demás; en especial, por sobre las ciudadanas. Finalmente, nuestro estudio reveló diferencias significativas en las fuentes utilizadas por publicaciones de origen televisivo, particularmente en el uso de fuentes políticas, de salud y ciudadanas, las cuales tuvieron una presencia mayor que en los demás tipos de medios
Notions of ‘race’ and disease are deeply imbricated across the globe. This article explores the historical, complex entanglements between ‘race’, disease, and dirtiness in the multicultural Chilean context of Covid-19. We conducted a quantitative content analysis and a discourse analysis of online readers’ comments (n = 1233) in a digital news platform surrounding a controversial news event to examine Chileans’ cultural representations of Haitian migrants and explore online racism and anti-immigrant discourse. Drawing on a decolonial approach, we argue that Covid-19 as a crisis has been fabricated at the expense of a constructed ‘other’. We show how colonial racist logics not only endure in digital spaces, but are made viral in new ways by representing Haitian migrants as ‘filthy’ and ‘disease carriers’. We identified two contemporary forms of racism – online cultural racism and online aggressive racism – through which people construct imaginaries of racial superiority in digital spaces.
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