Framing social conflicts in news coverage and social media: A multicountry comparative study

Abstract

This study attempts to understand how geopolitical proximity influences framing of social conflicts in news coverage and social media discussions. Within the context of 2013 Little India riot in Singapore, a manual content and automated linguistic analyses are conducted on 227 news articles and 4,495 tweets. A multinational comparison suggests that news media follow the traditional hypothesis of geopolitical proximity and international news coverage. However, Twitter seems less constrained by geopolitical boundaries of news making allowing citizens to bypass press censorship in an alternate information system. The reasons for framing differences across mediums and between countries are explored. Implications of these findings and limitations of the study are discussed.