Social Media is showing us just how biased the news is.
InstatData has been measuring ~400,000 social media conversations, in response to about 2,000 news articles in the lead up to the last 3 general elections. And we’ve learned a lot.
1. Sentiment is a very strong indicater of support of parties, our algorithim very closely correlates with official polls, and the election results from the last 2 elections and polls leading up to the 2023 election.
2. Our news is much much more biased than you think.
We measured how biased different news agencies are towards major parties in this election. As a very very brief couple of points. Over the past 3 election cycles we have found:
Radio New Zealand is the most biased in favour of the Labour Party, (posted the most positive news articles about the party)
However the discussion that followed on social media of each of these news stories was fairly even, suggesting their audience isn't swayed much by this.
Whereas NewstalkZB was most biased in favour of the National Party, and their audience largely agreed with them.
We also measured how much of the conversations about 1 party, involved hating on, bashing or slandering other parties. Supporters of National Party were much more vitriolic in their social media interactions towards the Labour Party than vice versa.
These are just some of the things we are picking out of this data set, have an explore for yourself below! (you can scroll through the 5 pages of data at the bottom)
