Analysis of information cascading and propagation barriers across distinctive news events

Abstract

News reporting, on events that occur in our society, can have different styles and structures, as well as different dynamics of news spreading over time. News publishers have the potential to spread their news and reach out to a large number of readers worldwide. In this paper we would like to understand how well they are doing it and which kind of obstacles the news may encounter when spreading. The news to be spread wider cross multiple barriers such as linguistic (the most evident one, as they get published in other natural languages), economic, geographical, political, time zone, and cultural barriers. Observing potential differences between spreading of news on different events published by multiple publishers can bring insights into what may influence the differences in the spreading patterns. There are multiple reasons, possibly many hidden, influencing the speed and geographical spread of news. This paper studies information cascading and propagation barriers, applying the proposed methodology on three distinctive kinds of events: Global Warming, earthquakes, and FIFA World Cup. Our findings suggest that 1) the scope of a specific event significantly effects the news spreading across languages, 2) geographical size of a news publisher’s country is directly proportional to the number of publishers and articles reporting on the same information, 3) countries with shorter time-zone differences and similar cultures tend to propagate news between each other, 4) news related to Global Warming comes across economic barriers more smoothly than news related to FIFA World Cup and earthquakes and 5) events which may in some way involve political benefits are mostly published by those publishers which are not politically neutral.

Political and Economic Patterns in COVID-19 News: From Lockdown to Vaccination

“…Spatio-temporal analysis is used to uncover the relations between locations over time [15]. Reference [16] identify spatial effects and spatio-temporal patterns of the outbreak of COVID-19 in different regions of Italy.…”

“…Each news article consists of a few attributes: title, body text, name of the news publisher, time of publishing. We estimate the political alignment of each newspaper using Wikipedia info-box as already done in [15]. We perform a number of preprocessing steps: conversion to lower case, removal of punctuation marks and removal of stop-words.…”

Profiling the barriers to the spreading of news using news headlines

“…The term barrier refers to the abstract fences that are in place between different societies, nations, and countries while transferring information. We know that the storylines of the news are anchored to the time, places, or entities; therefore, the coverage of news is hampered by news publisher's preferences (Rospocher et al, 2016 ; Sittar et al, 2022b ). The roots of the existence of the mentioned barriers relate to their influences.…”

“…The publishing language of a news media also influences the diffusion of news about global and local events (Wright, 2022 ), so we can say that there is a language barrier. Similarly, the political alignment of news publishers has a direct relationship with the published content, and it is called as a political barrier by Sittar et al ( 2022b ). Another contextual variable that has a direct relationship with different types of news is the economic situation (we call it the economic barrier), surrounding the news publisher.…”

“…News coverage in different fields, including sports, health, and computers, has different impact levels. We focus on five different types of barriers, including cultural, political, linguistic, economic, and geographic, as these are important barriers that can influence news spreading (Sittar et al, 2022b ). In this study, we assume that common sense-based semantic knowledge and sentiments of news headlines will help to classify barriers to the spreading of news.…”