Project

SuperGlue Kinesics

Copyright

Viral Communications

Viral Communications

Groups

The relationship between news content and its presentation has been a long-studied problem in the communications domain. Often, channels with a relatively smaller audience create a more powerful impact by amplifying the intensity of their content through a marked (usually biased) manner of presentation. SuperGlue Kinesics is a step in the direction of the investigation of this relationship and its influence on the public at large.

SuperGlue Kinesics is a media analyzer that fuses multiple modalities to create a comprehensive model for the cross-analysis of facial expressions, body gestures, posture, scene context, and other nonverbal cues in broadcast news. We explore the nature of news portrayal on different media outlets to understand how they affect their audiences and contribute to the formation of potentially dangerous "echo chambers."

Copyright

Viral Communications

Political bias in the media increases polarization during times of turbulence like the election season. Several news outlets indulge in post-truth politics, a culture in which debate is constructed largely through appeals to emotion over policy and through the repeated disregard of factual rebuttals to talking points. Sensationalized news further publicizes politicians and feeds snippets of data to the audience that may be misconstrued, false, or not contain the complete picture. The extended purpose of SuperGlue Kinesics is to target such political, corporate, mainstream, racial, and gender bias in media.

SuperGlue Kinesics is a part of the SuperGlue initiative and supports other news-related experiments. 

Copyright

Pew Research Center