Media analysis that reflects the spread of anti- Christian opinion Monika Briedienė Valdas Kilpys Tomas Krilavičius Vytautas Magnus University Vytautas Magnus University Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania Lithuania Baltic Institute of Advanced Technology monika.briediene@vdu.lt valdas.kilpys@gmail.com Lithuania t.krilavicius@bpti.lt Abstract— This paper presents an interdisciplinary research information resources and, after its operationalization, purify on the dissemination of anti-Christian information in the resistance points for the part of empirical research. Lithuanian media (period: 2016.01.01-2019.01.01). The object of the research is the main directions of expression of anti- The research of the main trends of verbal aggression by Christian verbal aggression. With this study, we analyze the impact on the congregation permits to make the following fundamental problem: how to detect and evaluated verbal conclusion: verbal aggression is generally expressed aggression directed against Christians beliefs. There are two indirectly by describing a “hero” by aggressive text author. areas of research in this place: computerized data collection, Usually a churchman becomes a target. According to the areas processing and expert of theology evaluation of data and results. that face verbal aggression, the relevant keywords were Such a study has not been conducted in Lithuanian media so far, formulated: 2-3 keywords have been assigned to each topic. it has only a few matches in general as well. The results allowed us to detect a portal and a topic that contained the most The ultimate goal of this research can be achieved by aggressive texts. performing the following intermediate tasks: (1) a related work analysis (see Section II), (2) qualitative research (see Keywords— verbal aggression, anti-Christian propaganda, Section III), (3) a construction of the representative corpus media framing, Lithuanian language media containing Lithuanian texts (see Section IV), (4) an analytical selection of the most promising methods, evaluation of the I. INTRODUCTION obtained results (see Section V) (5) conclusions The spread of today’s information space has become a (recommendations) and our further research plans (see major challenge not only in terms of mutual communication. Section VI). Due to the ever-increasing number of electronic texts, various natural language processing works are becoming increasingly Qualitative research Quantitative Research important. Virtual reality, as equivalent to unseen existence, (Expert Interview) (Content Analysis) slowly, but surely intrudes into human consciousness and changes a human being and his whole value system, including Data analysis. Results faith matters. That is why this research becomes very Interpretation important to Christians community. The problem of work is reflected in the fact that information passed through verbal Fig. 1 Visualization of projected directions of analysis aggression against faith has become inevitable in the present world. Therefore, having an aspiration of faith, which is II. RELATED WORKS inevitably linked to the aspect of personality, the believer may Due to the interdisciplinarity of work, any similar study also encounter a rather unfriendly information space, which was not identified. However, the basic idea of the work is to has an impact on faith and is the object of exploration of this find texts in online media that form the reader's opinion. The article in the most general sense. importance of this topic is justified by several authors [4], [5]. Many researches [1], [2], [3] underline the influence of The relevance and impact of the study is justified by the article media aggression on the formation of personal opinion and [6]: “Our findings illuminate how variation in media human behavior. In this context, studies are necessary, on the attentiveness conjoin to determine whether and the degree to basis of which the main forms of aggression that arise from which no fundamentalists feel antagonistically toward virtuality and are directed against faith could be identified. Christian fundamentalists.” Other study [7] on Christian rights The scheme for achieving this goal is illustrated below (see talks about morality and identity politics. It becomes clear that Figure 1). However, the performance of studies is inseparable the question of the influence of the Church is very important from the necessity to identify “reference points”. After for the state. Under consideration is question how much the structured interviews with experts (respondents), topics Church influenced legislation. (areas) affected by verbal aggression are in this order: (1) In our study we focus on verbal aggression in Lithuanian Ethical aspects of artificial insemination, (2) The ethics of media against Christian beliefs. Aggression in the media topic priests and monks (property issues, celibacy, etc.), (3) [2], [3] is important for many researches. Some study [8] Influence of the Church on political state processes. The provides a meta-analysis review of the experimental effects of analysis of the resulting material will enable systematic media violence on viewers' aggression in unstructured social coverage of the totality of approaches that exist in specific interaction. © 2019 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Annotated data are required for qualitative media analysis. Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Text mining methods are specify by several authors in book 125 [9]. According to our research, we chose to harvest the web. data which was found with modified keywords. Selected tool simply turns websites into structured data. Lemmatization, diacritics ignorance and distance size between phrase words were used as methods for modification. III. QUALITATIVE RESEARCH It leads to contain data that are more useful. Expert interviews (qualitative research) are the first stage Next step was data cleaning. There was a part of articles of empirical research. Its main task is to identify the most vivid (about 5 %) that overlaps through the same topics several forms of verbal aggression and fields by using the data times. To avoid inaccuracies in the final results, such texts obtained. In subsequent chapters (with specific problem fields have been removed and left only the first option found. that are most attacked in new media) discuss in detail and contextually the frequency, strength, and contextuality of After all data preprocessing, the expert of theology aggression in the new media. indexed all articles by evaluating relevance by keyword and topic. The use of the Likert scale in this case is not expedient, The essential statement that emerged from the first part of as it is best suited for exploring a clear object with positive the empirical study is that none of the 9 experts (respondents) and negative statements. Meanwhile, in this case, we are claimed that the Lithuanian-language news portals dominate dealing with much more complicated, multi-faceted, different the positive attitude towards the Church, faith, and believers. from conventional marketing research objects. The focus of this part of the empirical research is on the Low index articles were called inappropriate (see Figure topics/areas most affected by verbal aggression in the new 3). This information influenced the final calculations of the media. According to the results, after the semi-structured level of aggression. It should be noted that a database gathered interviews with experts/respondents, the topics/areas affected with one tool is not suitable for our investigation and needs to by verbal aggression were as follows: be redesigned in a manually. a) Ethical aspects of artificial insemination; b) The ethics of priests/monks (property issues, celibacy, etc.); c) Influence of the Church on political state processes. 16% 35% Delfi.lt (1) It was found that the first and second for most of the experts were equally important and did not lead to more Lrytas.lt (2) ambiguity. However, the interlocutors could not clearly agree 15min.lt (3) on the third item and the topic “Influence of the Church on 49% Political State Processes” in the field of research was only a marginal gain IV. DATA SET We have performed data analysis of three biggest and most Fig. 2 Distribution of articles between portals popular (according to total number of real users [10]) online media sources in Lithuania: Delfi (1)1, Lrytas (2)2, 15min.lt (3) 3 (selected period: 2016.01.01-2019.01.01). Each case required different approaches and tools, so in this study we use 3rd topic 46 2721 36 OutWit Hub 4 for finding, collecting (scrapping) and organizing all necessary data. OutWit Hub [11] dissects web pages into their different elements (contacts, links, images, data, news, etc.). As the program knows how to navigate from 2nd topic 83 125 47 100 page to page in sequences of results, it can automatically extract quantities of information objects and organize them into usable collections. Such a method was used to select the required information: article title, date, number of comments. 1st topic 128 217 53 116 The selected data consist of 999 articles and annotated video or reportage (see Figure 2). Some a picturesque examples of selected articles title: “31-year-old priest, known 0 100 200 300 400 500 600 as Ben Lyris in Facebook: my priest's life as an anonymous alcoholic”, “After the sex scandal, the priest offered to address Delfi.lt (1) Lrytas.lt (2) 15min.lt (3) not usefull data the pope: and it is not clear to the devil where the truth lies”, “Vatican Radio Journalist: The Pope is the best in the world Fig. 3 Number of articles in topics by portal to buy” and etc. For finding useful articles in web portals we used lexical units selected by the expert of theology: 2-3 keywords were chosen for each of the three topics named above (for accurate distribution see Figure 3 and Figure 4). Firstly, the phrases were used in the form specified by the expert, lately we added 1 3 https://www.delfi.lt https://www.15min.lt 2 4 https://www.lrytas.lt Downloaded from https://www.outwit.com/ 126 has shown that aggressive texts are presented to readers more than every two days (see Figure 9). The level of aggression in the articles was evaluated by an expert of theology. After analyzing the data, it is determined that the most aggressive texts are written by web portal Lrytas 3rd topic 30 64 (see Figure 10), the most aggressive topic is Ethical aspects of artificial insemination. 2nd topic 77 149 29 1st topic 71 82 245 0 100 200 300 400 500 1st keyword 2nd keyword 3rd keyword Fig. 4 Number of articles by topic founded by different keywords V. METHODOLOGY, EXPERIMENTS AND RESULTS We have conducted qualitative and quantitative content analysis. Researchers [12] most often analyze patterns of content quantitatively using statistical methods, also use qualitative methods to analyze meanings of content within texts. The combination of methods is particularly common in interdisciplinary research; this study is not an exception either. Research on the dissemination of anti-Christian information was done with prepared set of collected data. Necessary data was analyzed with R5 program [13]. The same tool was used for graphical analysis, too. Our results answer to the question: what is seen from the main Lithuanian media in a particular topic by ordering results by time scale (see Figure 5, Figure 6, Figure 7). Most of the information is reflected in the spikes in articles discussing certain topic. After collecting all of these spikes (periods of interests), they can be compared to the available context data. Relevant context was identified by experts of theology. Certain world events are repeating every year or are recurring periodically, others are one-off but significant. There were two context data lists made: one for the first topic and another for the second and the third topics together. The data representing the first thesis (Ethical aspects of artificial insemination) shows that the largest number of articles against Christians was written in December 2016. At that time, topics of artificial insemination, embryo storage and donation were actively discussed in Lithuania, and the Seimas of the Republic of Lithuania adopted new legislation. Other articles frequency overlaps in web portals are also strongly related to political situation. In this way, the opinion of the community is strongly forming, influencing the opinion of the individual. The data about the second and third topics is very similar (see Figure 8). Most articles were published in September 2018 - at that time Pope visited Lithuania. Other coincidence is June 2016: these facts supported the theory that at the beginning of the admission to the seminary, the number of articles directed against Christians is increasing. The intenseness of the impact of verbal aggression depends on the attitudes of the acceptor, but the publishing frequency of articles remains important. Statistical analysis 5 Downloaded from https://www.r-project.org/ 127 15,00 11,96 10,00 10,31 8,69 5,00 0,00 DELFI.LT (1) LRYTAS.LT (2) 15MIN.LT (3) Fig. 5 Number of articles in the first topic by portals Fig. 9 Frequency of portals writing during the period Fig. 6 Number of articles in the second topic by portals Fig. 10 Average of aggression levels in articles Fig. 7 Number of articles in the third topic by portals VI. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORKS After all investigations done, we can assert that (1) the most aggressive texts are written by web portal Lrytas Fig. 8 Data similarity between the second and third topics (https://www.lrytas.lt), (2) the most aggressive topic in Lithuanian media is Ethical aspects of artificial insemination, 0,400 (3) aggressive texts are presented to readers more than every 0,350 two days, (4) articles frequency overlaps in web portals are 0,300 also strongly related to political phenomena. 0,337 0,250 In this work we offer and test the chosen methods for a 0,200 specific field of research. This media analysis reflects the 0,234 spread of anti-Christian opinion in 2016-2018 years in three 0,150 most popular Lithuanian web portals. These research findings 0,100 are the result of knowledge generated through multiple 0,110 0,050 theological research and data science methods. These methods 0,000 are not entirely new, but the application is very specific and quite unique in this position. Delfi.lt (1) Lrytas.lt (2) 15min.lt (3) In principle, the proposed method is also applicable to other (non) denominations of faith, but the basic condition for 128 choosing it should be related to the amount of material and a [4] M. C. Nisbet , T. P. Newman, Framing, the Media, and certain rule in the new media for the type of verbal aggression Environmental Communication, The Routledge Handbook Of under investigation. Environment And Communication, 2015. [5] D. Scheufele, "Framing as a theory of media effects," Journal of Evaluation of the theoretical possibilities of overcoming Communication, vol. 49, no. 1, pp. 103-122, 1999. the aforementioned aggression trends is not the main objective [6] L. Bolce, G. De Maio, "A Prejudice for the Thinking Classes: of this paper. It is rather implied trend of further studies. 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