Profiling Media Outlets and Audiences on Facebook: COVID-19 Coverage, Emotions and Controversy

Luciana Oliveira, Joana Azevedo

2021

Abstract

The outburst of the COVID-19 pandemic was accompanied by a steeply rise of worldwide media coverage of the phenomena, in which social media were deemed as critical platforms and became a popular place to receive and share information, as well as express personal views. In this paper, we present the preliminary results of an ongoing work devoted to analysing the media coverage of the COVID-19 outburst in Portugal (March-May 2020), the subsequent emotional engagement of audiences and the entropy-based emotional controversy generated. Using a cross-sectional descriptive methodology, we analyse the activity of the three major news outlets in the country for the category of general news. Our results reveal three distinct profiles of media coverage, negativity as the core engine for interacting with news and spreading information, negative and volatile Facebook reactions (“Angry”, “Haha” and “Wow”) as main inputs for controversy, prevailing on COVID-19 news, and a general tendency of audiences to share controversial news.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Oliveira L. and Azevedo J. (2021). Profiling Media Outlets and Audiences on Facebook: COVID-19 Coverage, Emotions and Controversy. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Volume 1: WEBIST, ISBN 978-989-758-536-4, pages 186-196. DOI: 10.5220/0010717400003058

in Bibtex Style

@conference{webist21,
author={Luciana Oliveira and Joana Azevedo},
title={Profiling Media Outlets and Audiences on Facebook: COVID-19 Coverage, Emotions and Controversy},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Volume 1: WEBIST,},
year={2021},
pages={186-196},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0010717400003058},
isbn={978-989-758-536-4},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Volume 1: WEBIST,
TI - Profiling Media Outlets and Audiences on Facebook: COVID-19 Coverage, Emotions and Controversy
SN - 978-989-758-536-4
AU - Oliveira L.
AU - Azevedo J.
PY - 2021
SP - 186
EP - 196
DO - 10.5220/0010717400003058