Subjectivity in news on social media: A comparison of news status messages produced by quality and popular news sources.
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2023-06-22
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en
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With the rapid growth of social media, an increasing number of people use this platform to keep themselves up to date with the news. News on social media is written using less formal writing norms compared to those used for offline news or items on the website. An example of this is a higher level of subjectivity. As subjective language has been shown to be frequently used for fake news or misinformation, it is important to investigate where on the internet subjectivity in news is most present; in items by popular or quality news organizations? In this way, readers can be warned about the possibility of reading fake news or misinformation. There is no existing research yet in which these two types of newspapers were compared with regard to their level of subjectivity when the topics were controlled for. Therefore, this current corpus research studies the difference in subjectivity level between quality and popular news on social media. This is measured by looking at the difference in the presence of intensifiers and emoticons in status messages from two quality and two popular news organizations on Facebook. A higher presence of emoticons and intensifiers was found in popular news status messages than in those of quality news organizations. In addition, results show that also when human readers rated the status messages on subjectivity, popular news status messages scored significantly higher than those from quality newspapers. This is in line with the general finding of this paper that, at least when looking at just two indicators of subjectivity, popular status messages contain a higher level of subjectivity than quality news status messages. The paper concludes with a call for further research into additional indicators of subjectivity.
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