FRAPPE : FRA ming, Persuasion, and Propaganda Explorer (2024)

Abstract: The abundance of news sources and the urgent demand for reliable information have led to serious concerns about the threat of misleading information. In this paper, we present FRAPPE, a FRAming, Persuasion, and Propaganda Explorer system. FRAPPE goes beyond conventional news analysis of articles and unveils the intricate linguistic techniques used to shape readers’ opinions and emotions. Our system allows users not only to analyze individual articles for their genre, framings, and use of persuasion techniques, but also to draw comparisons between the strategies of persuasion and framing adopted by a diverse pool of news outlets and countries across multiple languages for different topics, thus providing a comprehensive understanding of how information is presented and manipulated. FRAPPE is publicly accessible at https://frappe.streamlit.app/ and a video explaining our system is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RlTfSVnZmk

## introduction as the digital age ushers in an era of unparalleled connectivity and information dissemination, the transition towards online news media has brought several changes in the way the news is produced, consumed, and distributed. although online news offers advantages such as increased accessibility and reduced cost of publishing, it has also brought several challenges such as the potential reinforcement of biases and propaganda. consequently, analyzing news articles and offering an in-depth understanding beyond surface-level text has become pivotal for addressing these challenges. to get a global picture, there is also a need to analyze and to compare entire news media as well as the news landscape in different countries around a given topic. a number of manual fact-checking initiatives have been launched. for example, media bias/fact check foot_0 and newsguard foot_1 offer assessments of the biases and the factuality of reporting of entire news outlets. there have also been a number of initiatives for fact-checking individual claims such as factcheck, 4 politifact, 5 and snopes, foot_4 among many others. however, they all require tedious manual work by human fact-checkers, which does not scale and cannot cope with the volume of disinformation online. thus, automation has been proposed as a possible alternative. recently, it has been further realized that it is important to focus not only on factuality, but also on the way the message is conveyed, e.g., using subjectivity/humor, framing, and persuasion techniques. as a parallel research line, a variety of research systems have been developed for the purpose of news analysis across several dimensions. for example, the prta system @xcite allows users to explore the use of 18 propaganda techniques in news articles. another tool, newslens @xcite , focuses on constructing cohesive narrative threads that span several years and articles from approximately 20 news sources. yet another system, tanbih @xcite , offers a profiling mechanism that covers a substantial yet confined collection of a few thousand media sources, which it profiles for factuality and bias of reporting. we can also mention newsscan @xcite , which is a plugin to profile news articles on the basis of specific labels providing information about the lexical properties (ease of reading), as well as some intrinsic properties (sentiment score, political bias), referred to as nutrition labels. however, there is a lack of publicly accessible tools with the capability not only to analyze articles, but also to systematically explore and to draw comparisons between the strategies of persuasion and framing adopted by a diverse pool of news outlets and countries across many languages for a specific topic. with the aim to bridge this gap, we developed frappe (framing, persuasion, and propaganda explorer), an online news analysis platform that operates in a multilingual setup and provides two main functionalities: on-the-fly analysis for individual articles, and a user-friendly, interactive, and insightful web interface for analyzing a database of 2m+ articles from 8k+ different media sources around the globe, in a variety of languages, covering two main topics: (i) the russia-ukraine conflict and (ii) climate change. this enables users to gather insights about framing, persuasion, and propaganda at an aggregate level, by news outlet and by country, and also to compare different news outlets and different countries. ## system architecture frappe is a comprehensive system with two subsystems. the first one enables users to analyze differences in framings and propaganda techniques across countries and media sources. the second one allows users to explore the genre, the framings, and the propaganda techniques used in an individual custom article, which can be analyzed on the fly. we implemented both subsystems using streamlit, a free and open-source framework for building and sharing machine learning and data science web applications. news media explorer we applied our customdeveloped models, focusing on framing and persuasion techniques, to a dataset of 2,281,254 articles about the russia-ukraine conflict, sourced from 8,318 media outlets across 196 countries. these articles were processed and indexed on our platform, utilizing the models converted to onnx format and deployed on nvidia triton for enhanced inference speed, powered by two nvidia rtx 4090 gpus. the aggregated results can be explored using the demo, enabling users to conduct customized analysis based on their preferences. ## interface our system interface is designed with user friendliness and accessibility in mind, and it offers an immersive journey into the analysis of the two collections of articles we currently have loaded. the interface is divided into two engaging subsections. the news media explorer allows the user to explore the analysis of a collection of articles conveniently aggregated both by their source and country of origin, while the custom article analysis offers real-time processing capability for an individual article. ## conclusion and future work we presented frappe, a system for analysis of the news in terms of framing, persuasion, and propaganda techniques, which can be used to tackle the challenge of misleading information in news articles and news outlets. it provides a deep understanding of news articles, allowing users to gain insights into genre, framing, and propaganda techniques, and to perform comparison of media and countries. in future work, we aim to gather more data, to extend the analysis to other globally discussed topics, and to update our visualizations with more in-depth analysis that goes down to the individual article level. we further plan to create a database that will automatically save every article that was analyzed on the fly (in a separate collection). finally, we aim to improve our models' accuracy, and to add additional models and analysis.