News Consumption in Time of Conflict: 2021 Palestinian-Israel War as an Example

TL;DR

This study analyzes Twitter news consumption patterns during the 2021 Israeli-Palestinian conflict, revealing how users engage with foreign, less popular sources that reinforce their views and offer more extreme content.

Contribution

It introduces an unsupervised stance detection method to analyze large-scale Twitter data and uncovers how users' news consumption shifts toward hyper-partisan sources during conflict.

Findings

Users consume more foreign and less popular sources during conflict.

Such sources tend to be hyper-partisan or sensational.

Popularity of these sources does not persist long-term.

Abstract

This paper examines news consumption in response to a major polarizing event, and we use the May 2021 Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an example. We conduct a detailed analysis of the news consumption of more than eight thousand Twitter users who are either pro-Palestinian or pro-Israeli and authored more than 29 million tweets between January 1 and August 17, 2021. We identified the stance of users using unsupervised stance detection. We observe that users may consume more topically-related content from foreign and less popular sources, because, unlike popular sources, they may reaffirm their views, offer more extreme, hyper-partisan, or sensational content, or provide more in depth coverage of the event. The sudden popularity of such sources may not translate to longer-term or general popularity on other topics.