Characterizing News Portrayal of Civil Unrest in H ong K ong, 1998–2020 (2021)

Abstract: We apply statistical techniques from natural language processing to a collection of Western and Hong Kong–based English-language newspaper articles spanning the years 1998–2020, studying the difference and evolution of its portrayal. We observe that both content and attitudes differ between Western and Hong Kong–based sources. ANOVA on keyword frequencies reveals that Hong Kong–based papers discuss protests and democracy less often. Topic modeling detects salient aspects of protests and shows that Hong Kong–based papers made fewer references to police violence during the Anti–Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement. Diachronic shifts in word embedding neighborhoods reveal a shift in the characterization of salient keywords once the Movement emerged. Together, these raise questions about the existence of anodyne reporting from Hong Kong–based media. Likewise, they illustrate the importance of sample selection for protest event analysis.

## introduction in this era where movements against entrenched power structures are both widespread and well documented, we can conduct computational analyses of language to guide, support, and challenge hypotheses about unrest and its discussion in mainstream written media sources. we direct these tools to analyze portrayals of protest and unrest in hong kong over a period of 22 years. public protests in hong kong date back to british colonial rule and have evolved from the bloody riots of the 1960s to the protests of 2019-2020, when up to two million people took to the streets over an extradition bill. they feared it would make the hong kong inhabitants subject to china's legal system in violation of the basic law 1 , which we apply a host of techniques from natural language processing to mark inconsistencies in event characterizations, analyzing news articles related to episodes of civil unrest between 1998 and 2020, in both western-and hong kong-based englishlanguage newspapers. in the volatile context of hong kong politics, newspapers' tendency to report more dramatic than ordinary events may encourage reporting bias that either emphasizes or undermines the legitimacy of the protests or the legitimacy of the regime against which the protests are directed @xcite @xcite . our contributions are manifold. foremost, our work is novel amongst work on protests and natural language due to the expanse of our time horizon. second, we characterize crucial differences in western-and hong kong-based portrayals of protest: statistically significant differences in protest-related lexical choice ( §5.1), reinforced by differences in treatment of democracy and police violence ( §5.2), though with no major differences in sentiment ( §5.4). third, we find several key points where coverage differs ( §5.3), including a major shift in the notion of "confrontation". ## related work content analysis @xcite , in general, is a set of non-invasive techniques for studying communication artifacts such as documents, photographs, and recordings. computational methods have supercharged content analysis by complementing subject matter expertise with the potential for massive scale. @xcite consider the content of united states history textbooks in texas, using word embedding similarity, topic models, and dependency parsing to generate clues toward differing portrayals of race and gender. @xcite relate the content of russian state-run news articles to the nation's economic performance, finding an agenda of distraction through the framework of granger causality @xcite . other attempts at content analysis and stylometry consider authorship @xcite , native language identification @xcite , and deceptive communication in reviews @xcite . with the advent of fast-paced 'social' media, recent work @xcite @xcite has aimed to characterize unrest through tweets, short communiques on the platform twitter. within the specific focus of protests, the closest work to ours in longitudinal scope is papanikolaou and papageorgiou (2020), whose 541 thousand news articles (albeit not all about protest) reflect greece from 1996 to 2014; other similarly broad-scale work is rare. @xcite apply topic models and named entity recognition to protest event analysis. the clef 2019 protest-news shared task asked participants to perform event extraction, even in news articles about a country outside of the training set. the organizers report consistent drops in performance after this shift. inverting this, our work calls into question different views on protest in the same location. ## data we collected a corpus of news articles collected from six western-based english language newspapers: the new york times, the wall street journal, the washington post, the financial times, the guardian, and the times; and two hong kongbased english language newspapers: the china daily and the south china morning post, covering multiple incidents of protests that took place between january 1998 and june 2020. the newspapers were purposefully selected because they are english-language newspapers; the selection ensures newspaper diversity within western-and hong kong-based newspapers to allow for insights into differences across cultures. the articles were collected through keywordbased searches in proquest newspapers for the western english language newspapers, and newsbank access world news research collection for the english language hong kong newspapers. we searched for the keywords "hong kong" + "protests", "hong kong" + "rallies", "hong kong" + "marches", and "hong kong" + "riots". we used the east coast editions for the new york times and the wall street journal; the uk editions for financial times, the guardian, and the times, and the overseas edition for china daily (which is run and printed in hong kong). to be eligible for collection, articles had to be at least 300 words long. we manually screened the collected articles to eliminate irrelevant items such as duplicates within each publication, readers' letters, and articles that included any of the research chosen keywords but whose content was not about the protest incidents. following the manual screening, we retained 4175 articles, with a mean length of 782 tokens. the south china morning post and the new york times published the largest number of articles about protests in hong kong between 1998 and 2020. the south china morning post published the most articles on hong kong protests among all newspapers, and the new york times published the most among western-based newspapers. ## method we aim to contrast the treatment of civil unrest in hong kong, both across news sources and over time. here we outline four techniques to suit this purpose: analysis of word choice with anova, analysis of word clusters with latent dirichlet allocation, analysis of word usage with embedded neighborhood shifts, and analysis above the word level with sentiment analysis. ## results and discussion in this section, we analyze and give historical context for the results of the four techniques we describe in §4. ## conclusion we show that techniques from natural language processing can guide, answer, and suggest questions in social science. while past work focuses on single movements or eras, we characterize the portrayal of civil unrest in hong kong over a period of 22 years. using a curated and manually filtered corpus of 4175 articles from western-based and hong kong-based newspapers, we identified clear differences in framing both across time and between western-based and hong kong-based newspapers. our approaches shed light on the ways in which western and hong kong-based portrayals have evolved over time. for instance, while both discussed the scholarist movement's rise to prominence in 2012 in roughly equal proportions, the discussion of police violence was much more prominent in western sources than in hong kong-based sources. similarly, western-based sources are far more likely to discuss protests than hong kong-based sources. this has implications for the extraction of protest-related events from corpora with politically opposed sources such as ours. further, july 1, 2019 marked a turning point across western and non-western sources in the characteristics of usage for confrontation-related vocabulary. the efficacy of event extraction models presupposes that the event in question is discussed in the considered collection of documents. in characterizing significant differences in portrayal across news sources, we implore that a critical eye be applied to the data selection process. we are working to quantify the degree to which event extraction systems are stymied by content and framing differences. finally, we have binned all articles from each year for much of our analysis. this blends news coverage leading up to unrest and portrayals of it afterward. does language in news media cause (or at least, granger-cause) protest sizes? future work will more precisely measure differences in news content and framing around points of civil unrest.