Circulating health rumors in the ‘Arab World’: A 12-month content analysis of news stories and reader commentary about Middle East Respiratory Syndrome from two Middle Eastern news outlets
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Internet provides great opportunity for news as well as entertainment. One such use is to keep abreast of public health concerns. As news outlets’ websites give the audience the privilege of interacting and posting comments as an ‘anonymous user’ following the posted story, these initial comments trigger further comments—which can lead to speculation, rumor, and inaccurate information. The purpose of the current study was to compare one year of news and comments about the outbreak of Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome from two major Middle Eastern online news outlets from June 2013 to June 2014. All stories and reader comments about this topic were collected from Al Jazeera and Al-Arabiya and reviewed using framing analysis to determine their framing and approach to the outbreak. The research focused primarily on how discussion and rumor may spread through both the stories as well as the controversial commentary sections.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it