Kittens and Jesus: What would remain in a newsless Facebook?
This paper examines what would remain on Facebook if news content was removed, like the company temporarily did in Australia, in February 2021. Using a corpus of 3.3 million Facebook posts published in French in 2020 in four countries (Belgium, Canada, France and Switzerland), it compares media content to non-media content by submitting the text of the posts to three computational analyses: basic n-gram comparison, χ2 residuals and topic modeling. Two distinct spheres are defined within Facebook content: a “public interest” sphere, made up of media pages, and a “public’s interest” sphere, made... Mehr ...
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| Dokumenttyp: | Artikel |
| Erscheinungsdatum: | 2022 |
| Verlag/Hrsg.: |
University of Illinois at Chicago University Library
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| Schlagwörter: | Facebook / news / journalism / Belgium / Canada / France / Switzerland / French / text mining / computational methods / spacy / BERT / topic modeling |
| Sprache: | Englisch |
| Permalink: | https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-28928364 |
| Datenquelle: | BASE; Originalkatalog |
| Powered By: | BASE |
| Link(s) : | https://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/11815 |
This paper examines what would remain on Facebook if news content was removed, like the company temporarily did in Australia, in February 2021. Using a corpus of 3.3 million Facebook posts published in French in 2020 in four countries (Belgium, Canada, France and Switzerland), it compares media content to non-media content by submitting the text of the posts to three computational analyses: basic n-gram comparison, χ2 residuals and topic modeling. Two distinct spheres are defined within Facebook content: a “public interest” sphere, made up of media pages, and a “public’s interest” sphere, made up of non-media pages. Religious content and “inspirational” “feel good memes” were found to be most characteristic of a newsless Facebook.