Facebook 作為社會劫盜地圖：意識形態估計、媒體偏斜、與輿情隔離

Abstract

利用 Facebook 去識別化的公開資料，我們提出一個廣泛的框架，將美國不同類型的政治參與者 (如政治人物、新聞媒體、利益團體、與社會大眾等) 全部定位在共同的意識形態光譜上。透過辨認潛藏意識形態資訊的粉絲專頁，並選擇可能提供訊息的使用者，我們提供了新的關於政治人物意識形態與媒體偏斜的估計，這些估計也重製了傳統衡量的結果。此外，對一般大眾意識形態的估計結果也較符合全國與各州實際上的分配。與過去研究不同的是：我們的方法並不侷限在政治生活的特定層面；產生的大眾意識形態分配較為平滑合理；估計能隨著時間改變；並且可以依據不同議題做進一步分析。這使得我們的方法能延伸，並且更具使用價值。我們也討論了一些因為這個衡量方式所產生的未來研究方向，例如預測選舉結果，以及衡量在社群媒體上輿情隔離的程度。

We present a general framework to place different political actors including politicians, news outlets, interest groups, and the mass public all on the same ideological spectrum, using only de-identified, publicly available Facebook data. By specifying a potential ideological universe of fan pages and selecting informative users, we are able to give some new evidence and reproduce conventional measures regarding political ideal points and media slants, and also replicate ideology distribution of citizens both at national and at state levels. Unlike previous works, our procedure does not constrain to a specific aspect of political life, can generate a reasonably smooth mass ideology distribution, is time-variant, and is also topic-decomposable. This makes it extensible and useful for future research. Several new avenues of research made possible by our estimates such as election forecasting and measuring opinion segregation on social media are also discussed.