Researchers publish open-source repository using NLP to analyse the bias in BBC reporting on Palestine.

Submitted ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Linkerbaan@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩

Overview

This work aims to shed light on bias in BBC reporting on Palestine in a way that is both transparent and reproducible. We analyzed a total of 600 articles and 4000 livefeed posts on the BBC website between October 7, 2023 and December 2, 2023 in an attempt to surface the systematic disparity in how Palestinian and Israeli deaths are treated in the media.

The pipeline of the study is as follows:

We obtained source articles and livefeed posts from the BBC website by selecting relevant topics (see below for full list) and

We parsed the individual sentences using the Stanford CoreNLP natural language processing

Using the results from step 2, we identified sentences with mentions of death and manually tagged each one of them as referring to Palestinians, Israelis, neither or both. None of the tagging was performed automatically.

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Comments

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Kecessa@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
They’re missing the classics!

Kids/children vs people under 18

Hostage vs prisoners

As in *The Israeli hostages area mostly women and children, the Palestinians prisoners are mostly women and people under 18", in both cases they’re people that have nothing to do with the conflict, in both cases some of them aren’t adults.

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- gedaliyah@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Or maybe it’s because the Israelis, Thais, French, etc., were kidnapped from their homes for the express purpose of wartime negotiation, i.e. hostages. The Palestinians are all held in connection with crimes, including convictions for violent crimes.
  
  If anything, this has exposed major injustices in the Israeli criminal system, such as people being held for long periods of time without charges, unrealistically high conviction rates, etc.
  
  However, let’s also not buy into the Hamas line that the two groups are equivalent. That’s just an attempt to whitewash their Oct 7 atrocities.
  
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  - Mrkawfee@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    That’s not true. Israel routinely detains Palestinians including children for no reason other than leverage in negotiations.
    
    www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-67600015
    
    Thousands are held without charge and for indefinite periods:
    
    *As of November 1, Israeli authorities held nearly 7,000 Palestinians from the occupied territory in detention for alleged security offenses, according to the Israeli human rights organization HaMoked. Far more Palestinians have been arrested since the October 7 attacks in Israel than have been released in the last week. Among those being held are dozens of women and scores of children.
    
    The majority have never been convicted of a crime, including more than 2,000 of them being held in administrative detention, in which the Israeli military detains a person without charge or trial. Such detention can be renewed indefinitely based on secret information, which the detainee is not allowed to see. Administrative detainees are held on the presumption that they might commit an offense at some point in the future. Israeli authorities have held children, human rights defenders and Palestinian political activists, among others, in administrative detention, often for prolonged periods.*
    
    hrw.org/…/why-does-israel-have-so-many-palestinia…
    
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filister@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I think we should apply the same scrutiny to other websites and reveal their bias as well. But yes, it is interesting to note that killed was used 1066 times for Israel’s 1200 victims and only 1630 times for more than 22K killed by Israel’s strikes, that’s to some extent because every time BBC was reporting on some civilian casualties on the Palestine’s side they were feeling obliged to reiterate the reason of those killings.

Whether killing 22K, many of whom are kids and women in retaliation to 1200 on the other side is justified is a completely different story though

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- Linkerbaan@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  There was another NLP study done three months ago, which this current research is based on. That study focused on three other major US newspapers and their bias. Those three were:
  
  The New York Times (seemingly the biggest offender)
  
  The Washington Post
  
  The Wall Street Journal
  
  It would be great to have some kind of unified framework that could ingest the link to a news site and use NLP to fully analyze their language, though I suspect that it’s difficult to fully automate, as the existing studies needed to do some data cleaning by hand.
  
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CherenkovBlue@iusearchlinux.fyi ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Seems like the analysis is starting from the hypothesis that the BBC is biased, while a better scientific inquiry is “IS the BBC biased”.

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- Stoneykins@mander.xyz ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Noooooooooo. No.
  
  Everyone and every organization has a bias. Even a “neutral” bias is a bias. Finding out which way their bias leans is good info to figure out.
  
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- Deceptichum@kbin.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  No?
  
  Positing something and validating the theory through research is appropriate scientific inquiry.
  
  It’s obvious to many people that the BBC had a bias, there was no need to ask the question when they could answer the question.
  
  If you disagree, feel free to present a compelling study as to why you think so. That’s how the scientific method works.
  
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- Pips@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  A hypothesis is “I think x is true” or “x will happen if I do y.” It is a conclusory statement based on existing knowledge that then has to be proven and is one of the first things you learn to do in science. Asking “what happened to x” or “what is x” is not a hypothesis, it’s an open-ended inquiry. While both are useful, the hypothesis is specifically part of the scientific method. You’re proving or disproving smaller conclusions to answer a broader open-ended inquiry.
  
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guriinii@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
This is more than just bias, it’s outright racism.

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angelsomething@lemmy.one ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
This is excellent work!

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ABCDE@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Is this treating a few deaths as a tragedy and many as a statistic?

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- Linkerbaan@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  The word choice of “brutally slaughtered, murdered” etc is very different too. When Palestinians do something they get a lot of adjectives and people were massacered. When the IDF does something way worse someone “lost their life”.
  
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