[Paper Review] Pandemic Populism: Facebook Pages of Alternative News Media and the Corona Crisis -- A Computational Content Analysis

Svenja Boberg, Thorsten Quandt+2 more|arXiv (Cornell University)|Apr 6, 2020

Misinformation and Its Impacts47 references90 citations

TL;DR

The study analyzes German Facebook activity of alternative news media during early COVID-19 (Jan–Mar 2020) using computational content analysis to map reach, topics, actors, and presence of fake news/conspiracy narratives.

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic has not only had severe political, economic, and societal effects, it has also affected media and communication systems in unprecedented ways. While traditional journalistic media has tried to adapt to the rapidly evolving situation, alternative news media on the Internet have given the events their own ideological spin. Such voices have been criticized for furthering societal confusion and spreading potentially dangerous "fake news" or conspiracy theories via social media and other online channels. The current study analyzes the factual basis of such fears in an initial computational content analysis of alternative news media's output on Facebook during the early Corona crisis, based on a large German data set from January to the second half of March 2020. Using computational content analysis, methods, reach, interactions, actors, and topics of the messages were examined, as well as the use of fabricated news and conspiracy theories. The analysis revealed that the alternative news media stay true to message patterns and ideological foundations identified in prior research. While they do not spread obvious lies, they are predominantly sharing overly critical, even anti-systemic messages, opposing the view of the mainstream news media and the political establishment. With this pandemic populism, they contribute to a contradictory, menacing, and distrusting worldview, as portrayed in detail in this analysis.

Motivation & Objective

• Assess the reach and engagement of alternative news media on Facebook during the early COVID-19 crisis in Germany.
• Identify the central topics covered by these outlets in their Corona-related posts.
• Characterize the prominent actors and entities appearing in their coverage.
• Evaluate whether alternative news media posts included fake news or conspiracy theories as identified by fact-checkers.

Proposed method

• Crawled public Facebook content from 32 German-based alternative news media pages (plus 78 mainstream outlets and 282 fact-checking posts) using CrowdTangle (Jan 7–Mar 22, 2020).
• Preprocessed text (HTML removal, URLs, mentions, hashtags, punctuation, stopwords) and annotated named entities with Stanford CoreNLP; manual standardization of entities.
• Applied Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to discover latent topics, selecting k=11 based on model fit and validation tests.
• Employed a co-occurrence analysis of the top 20 named entities to map relationships among actors (persons, institutions, organizations).
• Reviewed 282 Corona-related posts from fact-checkers to identify four conspiracy/fake-news narratives and checked for presence in alternative media posts.

Experimental results

Research questions

• RQ1 RQ1a: How broad is the reach of the alternative news media’s Corona coverage on Facebook?
• RQ2 RQ1b: How many interactions do they evoke?
• RQ3 RQ2: What are the central topics of their Corona coverage?
• RQ4 RQ3: Who are the most prominent actors in their coverage?
• RQ5 RQ4: Do the messages include fake news or conspiracy theories as identified by fact-checkers?

Key findings

• Mainstream media posted more Corona-related content and generated higher total interactions, but alternative outlets still achieved substantial engagement with certain posts.
• On average, alternative outlets had 25% fewer interactions per post than mainstream outlets, with no large gap in engagement per post overall.
• Topic modeling revealed 11 topics, spanning factual infection/measure coverage and anti-establishment, anti-migration, and clickbait narratives consistent with populist framing.
• Co-occurrence analysis highlighted prominent actors (e.g., Angela Merkel, German government) and organizations (e.g., CDU) associated with anti-establishment or nationalist framings.
• Fact-checker review identified four conspiracy/fake-news narratives, with limited but notable presence in alternative media posts (e.g., migration-related framing, anti-establishment critiques).
• Overall, the alternative news outlets largely adhered to pre-crisis patterns (anti-establishment, anti-migration, populist frames) and contributed to a distrustful worldview during the Corona crisis.