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Media Bias Towards African-americans Before and After the Charlottesville Rally
[conference paper]
This document is a part of the following document:
Proceedings of the Weizenbaum Conference 2019 "Challenges of Digital Inequality - Digital Education, Digital Work, Digital Life"
Abstract African-Americans are still experiencing racial discrimination rooted in structural bias in US American society. Research has shown that this behaviour can be reduced if individuals are made conscious of their bias, but little is known about these mechanisms on a societal level. Envisaging the white... view more
African-Americans are still experiencing racial discrimination rooted in structural bias in US American society. Research has shown that this behaviour can be reduced if individuals are made conscious of their bias, but little is known about these mechanisms on a societal level. Envisaging the white-supremacist Charlottesville rally in 2017 as an event that rendered American society conscious of its racism, we scrutinise whether racial bias in the digital media has changed, comparing levels of pre- and post-Charlottesville bias. We fit word embedding models to a broad sample of largely US media and quantify bias by calculating cosine similarities between terms for black or white actors and positive or negative character traits. We find no differences in positive character traits after Charlottesville. However, African-Americans are associated substantially less with negative character traits post-Charlottesville, while white actors are semantically closer to negative traits.... view less
Keywords
attitude change; discrimination; public opinion; stereotype; online media; prejudice; digital media; United States of America; racism
Classification
Social Psychology
Social Problems
Interactive, electronic Media
Free Keywords
Media bias; Ethnic studies; Automated text analysis; Word embeddings; Charlottesville; Weizenbaum-Institut; Weizenbaum Institute
Collection Title
Proceedings of the Weizenbaum Conference 2019 "Challenges of Digital Inequality - Digital Education, Digital Work, Digital Life"
Conference
2. Weizenbaum Conference. Berlin, 2019
Document language
English
Publication Year
2019
City
Berlin
Page/Pages
10 p.
Status
Primary Publication; peer reviewed