Rumor Has It: Sensationalism in Financial Media

Ahern, Kenneth R.; Sosyura, Denis

doi:10.1093/rfs/hhv006

Cited by 208 publications

(151 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…Such patterns follow known dynamics associated with media sensationalism [14,15] and have been observed across a broad spectrum of mass media topics, including entertainment, sports, business, politics, and natural disasters [16]. Sensationalism has also been found to be a problem in the reporting of medical science [17].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 74%

Public Response to Scientific Misconduct: Assessing Changes in Public Sentiment Toward the Stimulus-Triggered Acquisition of Pluripotency (STAP) Cell Case via Twitter

Gayle

Shimaoka

2017

JMIR Public Health Surveill

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BackgroundIn this age of social media, any news—good or bad—has the potential to spread in unpredictable ways. Changes in public sentiment have the potential to either drive or limit investment in publicly funded activities, such as scientific research. As a result, understanding the ways in which reported cases of scientific misconduct shape public sentiment is becoming increasingly essential—for researchers and institutions, as well as for policy makers and funders. In this study, we thus set out to assess and define the patterns according to which public sentiment may change in response to reported cases of scientific misconduct. This study focuses on the public response to the events involved in a recent case of major scientific misconduct that occurred in 2014 in Japan—stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency (STAP) cell case.ObjectivesThe aims of this study were to determine (1) the patterns according to which public sentiment changes in response to scientific misconduct; (2) whether such measures vary significantly, coincident with major timeline events; and (3) whether the changes observed mirror the response patterns reported in the literature with respect to other classes of events, such as entertainment news and disaster reports.MethodsThe recent STAP cell scandal is used as a test case. Changes in the volume and polarity of discussion were assessed using a sampling of case-related Twitter data, published between January 28, 2014 and March 15, 2015. Rapidminer was used for text processing and the popular bag-of-words algorithm, SentiWordNet, was used in Rapidminer to calculate sentiment for each sample Tweet. Relative volume and sentiment was then assessed overall, month-to-month, and with respect to individual entities.ResultsDespite the ostensibly negative subject, average sentiment over the observed period tended to be neutral (−0.04); however, a notable downward trend (y=−0.01 x +0.09; R ²=.45) was observed month-to-month. Notably polarized tweets accounted for less than one-third of sampled discussion: 17.49% (1656/9467) negative and 12.59% positive (1192/9467). Significant polarization was found in only 4 out of the 15 months covered, with significant variation month-to-month (P<.001). Significant increases in polarization tended to coincide with increased discussion volume surrounding major events (P<.001).ConclusionsThese results suggest that public opinion toward scientific research may be subject to the same sensationalist dynamics driving public opinion in other, consumer-oriented topics. The patterns in public response observed here, with respect to the STAP cell case, were found to be consistent with those observed in the literature with respect to other classes of news-worthy events on Twitter. Discussion was found to become strongly polarized only during times of increased public attention, and such increases tended to be driven primarily by negative reporting and reactionary commentary.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 74%

Public Response to Scientific Misconduct: Assessing Changes in Public Sentiment Toward the Stimulus-Triggered Acquisition of Pluripotency (STAP) Cell Case via Twitter

Gayle

Shimaoka

2017

JMIR Public Health Surveill

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“…A variety of studies have found that financial news can have significant effects on stock price movements [23,24,25,26,27]. Recent studies try to extract events from the news with natural language techniques for event-driven prediction [28] [29].…”

Section: Sentiment and Stock Price Movementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploiting investors social network for stock prediction in China's market

Zhang¹,

Shi²,

Wang³

et al. 2018

Journal of Computational Science

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Recent works have shown that social media platforms are able to influence the trends of stock price movements. However, existing works have majorly focused on the U.S. stock market and lacked attention to certain emerging countries such as China, where retail investors dominate the market. In this regard, as retail investors are prone to be influenced by news or other social media, psychological and behavioral features extracted from social media platforms are thought to well predict stock price movements in the China's market. Recent advances in the investor social network in China enables the extraction of such features from web-scale data. In this paper, on the basis of tweets from Xueqiu, a popular Chinese Twitter-like social platform specialized for investors, we analyze features with regard to collective sentiment and perception on stock relatedness and predict stock price movements by employing nonlinear models. The features of interest prove to be effective in our experiments.

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“…Moreover, the financial media may be subject to similar biases. There is evidence that financial media sensationalism is prevalent and may influence investor behavior (Ahern and Sosyura, 2015).…”

Section: Promoting Returns Chasingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do academic investment insights benefit society?

Lai

2016

Research in International Business and Finance

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Rumor Has It: Sensationalism in Financial Media

Cited by 208 publications

References 49 publications

Public Response to Scientific Misconduct: Assessing Changes in Public Sentiment Toward the Stimulus-Triggered Acquisition of Pluripotency (STAP) Cell Case via Twitter

Public Response to Scientific Misconduct: Assessing Changes in Public Sentiment Toward the Stimulus-Triggered Acquisition of Pluripotency (STAP) Cell Case via Twitter

Exploiting investors social network for stock prediction in China's market

Do academic investment insights benefit society?

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